Ackroyd & Harvey: Hampton Common Oak Tree Circle

How can cities adapt to a rapidly warming world through increased tree-planting? 

Ackroyd & Harvey aim to understand the roots of the nature crisis by studying the mythic origin of trees, forests and deforestation. Looking to the future, they explore how cities can adapt to a rapidly warming world through increased tree-planting of biodiverse species.

Their on-going Beuys’ Acorns project began in 2007, with the artists collecting acorns from the environmental artwork 7000 Oaks: City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982) by Joseph Beuys.

Since 2007, the artists have nurtured the acorns they collected into thriving young trees. They are now planting many circles of seven trees in urban public spaces in partnership with cultural venues across the UK. One of these circles is newly sited on Hampton Common, as a catalyst for biodiversity and as a place for people to meet, convene and create with (and as part of) nature.

The project also includes gall ink drawings and photographs of the acorns bursting to life. Ackroyd & Harvey make the ink from galls collected from the project’s oak trees. Oaks are host plants for more than 70 species of cynipid gall wasps, which induce the plant to produce galls, or growths, which enclose the developing larvae. After the wasps emerge, the artists collect the empty galls and crush them to produce ink. These galls are part of the biodiversity a healthy oak tree supports.

The artists talk about the ‘radicle’ legacy of the Beuys’ Acorns project. (They deliberately use the botanical spelling ‘radicle’, to convey a double meaning of both the ‘primary root’ and a ‘radical’ action.) The project is designed to evolve and continuously benefit the local ecosystem, of both plants and people, for generations to come.

7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration (1982)

From 1982 to 1987, artist Joseph Beuys planted 7,000 trees with help from volunteers in Kassel, Germany. He chose oak for its longevity and connections with ancient Celtic folklore. Beuys believed art could be used to inspire social and political change. Seeing 7,000 Oaks as ‘only a symbolic beginning’, he hoped it would encourage people to plant trees across the world.

About Ackroyd & Harvey

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are internationally acclaimed for creating works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history. Their time-based practice reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event. Processes of germination, growth and decay (organic and inorganic) feature in artworks that often evolve through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their profound interest in local ecologies and global planetary concerns.

They give high profile keynotes and public presentations and contribute writings and photographs to books and journals. In 2019, the artists co-founded Culture Declares Emergency in response to the climate and ecological emergency.