Collect Open: Q&A with Forest + Found

If you think craft practice is largely an indoor pursuit, Forest + Found will quickly change your mind. You’re just as likely to find the London studio’s Max Bainbridge and Abigail Booth up a mountain excavating mineral deposits or selecting the perfect fallen branch from the forest floor, as beavering away in their self-built workshop in Walthamstow.

Whereas Max painstakingly crafts sculptural vessels from storm-felled wood, often scorching or carving their surfaces, Abigail creates muted, minimal wall-based textile works using natural dyes sourced from everyday matter, or plants collected on the duo’s frequent foraging trips. “This dialogue between our studio in the city and the sense of escape and freedom when we are away from it is vital to the energy of the work we produce,” they say.

For this year’s Collect Open (Saatchi Gallery, 22–25 February), Forest + Found is producing its biggest work to date. Called In The Between, the towering installation showcases how the duo channel the landscape into their work by hand and explores the subtle tension between the pair’s different practices. Launched in 2011, Collect Open is the much-anticipated part of international contemporary craft fair Collect where craftspeople develop site-specific installations, taking their practice up a gear or in a new direction. This year 14 makers (including Forest + Found) will be bringing brand new work to the fair, an inspiring crew selected by star designer Jay Osgerby with the Crafts Council’s Head of Exhibitions and Collections Annabelle Campbell and Project Curator Julia Ravenscroft. 

With Collect just around the corner, we caught up with Max and Abigail to talk about natural dyeing, foraging and the connection between making and landscape.

How did you first get into craft?

We come from a fine art background and graduated at a time when a lot of artists were turning away from making. We were both very interested in working with different materials and technical processes and when we set up our studio we were looking for ways to continue making and responding to materials that didn’t require a lot of start-up costs. This became the catalyst for seeking out raw materials such as storm-felled wood and natural pigments that could be worked by hand and allowed us to push traditional craft practices in a conceptual and experimental way.

Where did the inspiration for In The Between come from?

In The Between looks at the relationship between the physical presence of our wooden sculptures and the more intangible and abstract space of the flat image in our textile work. The installation is a continuation of our investigation into the use of natural materials as a way to question our place in the landscape we come from. The act of making allows us to relate to wood, earth and cloth in a way that examines their cultural significance, our relationship to natural resources and a need to work them by hand in order to gain a closer relationship to the land. The difference in the work we are making for Collect is its scale. We have always wanted the chance to produce pieces on a larger scale, to really push the materials we work with, as well our physical strength and endurance in producing pieces that test the limits of our current studio set-up.

Tell us about some of the other ingredients you use and where you forage them from?

At the moment we are really interested in using different earths, rocks and clays to extract natural colour. The mineral content of earth sourced from different places within the UK can have a profound effect when used in conjunction with wood tannins. Metal content such as iron and copper ore can alter colour and react to produce the most beautiful and subtle variations of colour on cloth. We research points of geological interest with mineral rich sediments and travel and hike to points where these earths or rocks are accessible on the surface and can be excavated and brought back to the studio. Often these places can have real cultural significance having attracted people throughout history for their rich natural resources or geographical advantage. These are the places we in turn are most drawn to; where the landscape bares the traces of lost industry or settlement.

Does living in London ever limit the natural materials you can gather for dying or carving?

On the contrary it makes us seek out sources of raw material that are both close to home and also much further afield. It relies on us building strong relationships with people as well as having a keen understanding of the natural landscape within London itself. We work with London’s forestry commission, tree surgeons and other craftsmen to source storm felled wood and trees that come down for forestry management. We travel extensively within the British Isles for research and to take part in artist residencies that allow us to source materials from different kinds of landscape.

What kind of challenges have you encountered while working on the Collect Open installation?

The sheer scale of the work we are making means that it will be more physically challenging than we are used to. The size and weight of both the fabric and the wood needed to create the installation is far greater than we have ever worked with before so it is exciting and daunting in equal measure. We are currently at the stage of sourcing material and travelling to different parts of the UK to excavate earth and seek out storm felled trees. We cannot wait to then bring these back to the studio and begin the process of experimenting and playing with the raw materials.

What’s your starting point for creating new work? Form or function, material or process?

The key to creating new work is found in our direct relationship to landscape. This is not particular to a specific place, but to the more transitory experience of discovering and being immersed in new landscapes. When working on our wooden sculptural pieces it tends to be a direct reaction to the material that starts when we are out in the forest working with the forestry commission. We are drawn to specific pieces of wood, depending on their size and form or the way they have responded to growing in a particular place. In the same way we seek out colour in landscape by excavating earth and foraging for sources of dye that in some way allow us to enrich our relationship to that place. Back in the studio we work very intuitively, with Max using hand tools to begin exploring the form of wood, and Abigail producing repetitive drawings that later become abstracted into larger compositions.

You released a book on natural dyeing this year. What was the process like of putting it together?

It was a fascinating and totally unexpected challenge to reconcile the timeline of our publishers with the unpredictable nature of working with the seasons. The very nature of working with plants and living organisms immediately grounds you, in that they wait for no man, and have no care for your need to work to a deadline. Our schedule was dictated by the weather, the falling of the leaves in autumn or the moment a flower came into bloom. It gave us real insight and a lasting understanding for the minutiae and subtleties of a year’s life cycle of the plants we were working with.

We can see a lot of the Shaker aesthetic in your work but are there other design or craft movements that inspire you?

We come from a background in fine art so have never consciously been inspired by or relate to specific design movements per se (although the simplicity of the Shaker aesthetic is definitely expressed in our home life). Our direct inspiration comes from the philosophies and working practices of artists’ whose work we admire such as Agnes Martin, David Nash, Robert Ryman and Barbara Hepworth. All these artists are driven by material and process and a need to question their materials through action and gesture and their physical presence as an artist with tool in hand. This tangible physical presence and impact on a material and visual landscape is something that we consciously relate to and pursue in our own work.

Where else have you exhibited recently?

The most exciting place we have exhibited this year has been the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. We were their artists in residence for 2017 and produced a film, ‘Unearthed’ which went on display alongside their archaeology exhibit. It was a chance for us to really experiment and step out of our comfort zone to begin exploring the power of moving image as another tool for exploring craft.

Want to find out more about Collect showing at the Saatchi Gallery 22-25 February? Visit the Crafts Council's website here.