Consisting of oaks…

Woodland Collection Launching Today!

What a beautiful day to launch a new collection!

At 10am this morning, my Woodland collection goes live in my online shop. I’ve been working so hard over the past few weeks to get all the pieces photographed and online (as well as in print) and I can honestly say, I’m knackered! But I thought I’d sit down this morning and tell you about another facet to the collection that has nothing to do with jewellery and everything to do with trees, oaks in particular.

As you may or may not know, my partner is an artist. I mentioned him in my previous blog post – the one about the story behind my Woodland collection. If you’ve not read that post, go and read it now as it’ll make the rest of this post make a bit more sense. It’s time to tell you about a little jewellery / art collaboration.

Colin and I have been planting acorns (and other seeds) together in autumn every year for many many years and we’ve now got a mini woodland on our doorstep. I started it off and Colin took the planting and growing to a whole new level.

Over the years the planting ‘grew’ into an idea and then into a project and with the launch of my new Woodland Collection I would like to support it financially. So whenever you buy a piece of jewellery from my Woodland collection, I will be donating a percentage of that sale to Colin’s project.

The project is called ‘akin’.

akin is a long-term, participatory artwork which symbolically creates a dispersed oak woodland in Scotland and conceptually links this to notions of nurture, community and sustainability.

akin is an old Scots word meaning, ‘consisting of oaks’.

In this work hundreds of oak trees, grown from acorns originally gathered in Fife, are to be re-planted across Fife. Individuals, families and businesses of the region are to be engaged in the planting and care of the trees in the gardens, parks, common lands and green spaces of the Kingdom, participating in a physical and symbolic cycle of growth, nurture, return, participation and sustainability.

akin (documentation) © Colin Andrews. All Rights Reserved.

The mystery and enchantment of the forest is deeply embedded in our culture, from ancient folklore to modern literature. Forests are places of magic and fear, shadows and shelters, exploration and adventure, getting lost and being found.  Almost all of us have had a tree in our past that has shaped us – we played, we climbed, we fell, we sheltered, we gathered, perhaps we kissed.  Each tree provides a meter, a measure of a life lived, and a tangible, annual cycle of life, death and rebirth that profoundly shapes our concept of time.

Colin Andrews
Akin, an artwork by Colin Andrews

The collecting and planting of acorns has become a bit of a family tradition each Autumn and it’s such a joy to see the tiny seedlings sprout each Spring and thinking ahead to the future, it’s amazing to think that within a forest ecosystem a single mature oak is able to support more than 1000 other species. Oaks once formed a third of all tree cover in Britain. Sadly this is no longer the case…

In our past we have torn up our forests to wage wars and fuel industry at an alarming rate and we have been remiss at replenishing our stock.

Colin Andrews

Hopefully ‘akin‘ can be a way to re-address that balance.

I’m hoping that my Woodland collection will sell well over the years and although my financial support to project may not be a huge contribution… every little helps.

If you’d like to be part of that support, you can shop the collection now…

I’ll be writing about the collection and ‘akin’ periodically from now on and you can find out more about Colin’s work on his website: www.colinandrews.org. To go straight to the page about ‘akinfollow this link…

Thank you!

E xxx

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