Sitka Project 2026
Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), native to the wet, temperate coasts of North America from northern California to Alaska, was introduced to Ireland in the late nineteenth century to provide fast-growing timber; commercial planting began in earnest in the twentieth century, and it now accounts for more than half of the country’s forest estate (Coford, 2020). Sitka spruce is the fifth-largest conifer in the world – growing up to 100 meters (330 ft) tall, with the oldest known individual just under 600 years old. Within commercial forestry in Ireland, the trees don't live long enough to grow that tall only reaching an average of 60ft within their planted lifetime. Planted on productive sites, initial thinning can occurs early, around 15 years in fast growing plantations, with later thinning (20–22 years) for slower-growing plantations. High-yield crops on good sites can be ready for clearfell at 28–30 years.
These cultivated forests have been criticised by groups for creating dense, uniform canopies that with restrict light and create acidic soil outcompeting native tree species. In 2020 Save Leitrim challenged the High Court against allowing an “alien species” of tree to be planted on a 13.3-hectare site in Dromahair.Other ecological actavist groups such as Irish Wildlife Trust argue that Sitka spruce plantations 'are bad for climate, bad for biodiversity and water and are bad for the communities that are forced to live with them.' Others propound that these plantations obliterate the landscape and leave large tracts of afforested lands that are “dark, foreboding and eliminate all life on the forest floor”. They are associated with declines in ground nesting species such as Hen harriers (around 150 breeding pairs remaining) with over half of Special Protection Areas for hen harriers planted with Sitka spruce; Curlews as well (could be extinct as a breeding species in Ireland within 10 years). Some even assert that these forests can have negative long term mental health impacts for the local residents. Yet these environments are not without life; beneath the orderly surface, mosses and small mycelial networks of fungi form quiet habitats that complicate the distinction between what is natural and what is constructed.
Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought offers a framework for this ambiguity, noting that increased ecological knowledge both deepens connection and intensifies strangeness (Morton, 2010, p. 17). Morton suggests that wilderness functions as the unconscious of modern society, a space where the fantasy of untouched ‘Nature’ allows us to preserve the dream of separation and of human exceptionalism. The cultivated spruce forest becomes a site where this dream logic unravels; its ordered rows and dark understory expose how the aesthetics of ‘Nature’ can obscure the ecological realities of human design
Through psychogeographic mapping of the layout of these spaces and documenting my own interpretation through video, paint and instilation, I expose how their rigid layout reveals an uncanny authority over movement. The disorientation within the work is shaped by ecological systems and material conditions where one can perhaps hear the mechanical whir of a chainsaw in the distance. This uncanniness recalls what Mark Fisher describes as the eerie: an unease produced by 'something where there should be nothing, or nothing where there should be something.' (Fisher, 2016). In the cultivated forest, this sensation lingers. Many Sitka spruce treeshave fallen, their shallow root systems easily lifted by wind in the wet Irish climate.
Sitka Project examines how, beneath layers of control in this man-made forest, alternative dynamics of life and agency persist. Through these inquiries, this work explores how ecological awareness might have something inherently strange about it, as if we were seeing behind the mossy curtain. By inviting viewers to encounter both the staging and the play, these works open a provisional world in which agency can be reimagined. In these moments of confusion, the distinction between human and tree, observer and environment, begins to waver; perhaps, in this world of repetition and renewal, we are the trees.
Coford (2020)Forest Statistics Ireland 2020: A review of the state of Ireland’s forest resources. Dublin: COFORD. Available at: llhttps://www.coford.ie/media/coford/content/publications/2020/35769COFORDbodyreportweb211220.pdf
Mark Fisher. (2016) The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
BirdWatch Ireland (2023) Curlew ecology. Available at: https://birdwatchireland.ie/87196-2/\
Colwell, M. (2018) A forestry boom is turning Ireland into an ecological dead zone. The Guardian, 10 October. Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/10/trees-ireland-biodiversity-sitka-birds-extinction
Forestry Ireland, 2021. Understanding Timber Products. [online] Available at: https://www.forestry.ie/images/MiscDocs/2021YearbookArticles/2021YB-Understanding_Timber_Products.pdf
Morton, T. (2010) The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
