25. Nature humaine 1 : arbres à loques, arbres de santé

 

Béatrice Saurel revisits the practice of rag trees through the eyes of an artist. An inheritance from Celtic culture and the forest peoples? The tradition of resorting in this way to the vitality of the tree in order to take care of yourself probably goes back to Neolithic times and still continues in Europe today – alongside modern medicine. In particular landscapes, certain trees, certain woods – are vested with healing powers. You attach an article of clothing worn by a person who is ill to a branch, so that the tree will bring them good health. On the branches of the rag trees, each knot is a cry, the sound of the body, whereas pleats and folds, draped, stirred by the wind, speak to us of hopes of seeing the wood bear, take away the illness, “take on your pain”.

 

 

In interpreting the rag trees, these “trees of health”, Béatrice Saurel and Michel Racine are this year continuing the transformation of the wood, whose landscape they had revealed last year, with their copse of red trees or cOlOrès. At the bottom of the small crater, probably made by a bomb, trunks, clothed in rags, are dressed like a human body. Accident becomes landscape and wood becomes habitat. The copse, an echo of practices which we pass by without seeing, is filled with questions. The wood is taking on a body, the wood is taking on a soul.

Béatrice SAUREL, landscape artist, and Michel RACINE, landscape architect and town planner

 

The artist and the landscape architect come from complimentary cultures, and in their projects they follow a common line: designing works in nature, garden, landscape and architecture in symbiosis - in the same habitat.

 

Béatrice Saurel, landscape artist. From her studio to nature itself, with her Mac mouse and her artist’s and artisan’s brushes in her hand, Béatrice Saurel has for some years been continuing to create work based on the concept of Human Nature^©, visual arts research into man’s position in his landscapes. She called her projects for transforming space through colour cOlOrès^©.

 

Michel Racine, landscape architect and town planner. Consultant in garden creation and the enhancement of cultural landscapes. He is the author of numerous reference works on gardens and landscape and set up the Visit a garden in France campaign, the “Creator of gardens in the landscape” training programme and diploma at the National Higher Institute for Landscape in Versailles and the Gardens and Health Association, open gardens for health.