Nottingham Castle was once at the centre of a sprawling forest, stretching from Radcliffe-on-Trent, all the way to Mansfield. In the 1200s, this forest extended across 100,000 hectares of Nottinghamshire, and today it still holds over a thousand ancient and veteran trees. For those with roots in Nottingham, Sherwood Forest’s mythology is inescapable. The Major Oak in particular is a cornerstone of many childhood memories including my own. It is a totem of stories told and lessons learned.
Today, it remains an icon worthy of anchoring FOREST, a temporary exhibition that blends commissions, collection works, and scientific research. Six newly commissioned works sit in dialogue with treasures from Nottingham’s collection, most prominently Andrew MacCallum’s vast 1882 canvas ‘Major Oak, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire’ of the grand tree painted at sunset. Together with commissions spanning sound, glass, wood-carving, textiles, film, painting and photography, they create an environment layered with sensory encounters that shift between intimacy and scale, the personal and the mythic.
Common themes are used by the curator, Tristram Aver, as a device to link these diverse practices: grief and memory, folklore and myth, the embodied act of walking, and the urgent realities of climate change are threaded through the exhibition. Some works speak of deeply personal connections to Sherwood Forest, while others look outward, situating the forest as both a symbol and a site within wider ecological and cultural narratives.
I enter Nottingham Castle through the painted white forest by local artist duo, The Window Women. Their delicate line drawings creep across the glass entrance and expand the exhibition outwards into the everyday. Inside, the galleries are washed in hushed greens and browns, conjuring the sense of passing beneath forgotten woodland boughs.
Ashley Gallant’s triptych-like ‘Green Man’ (2025) opens the exhibition. The monochrome photographs depict the time-honoured ritual of wassailing, a winter custom of singing to trees to bless them for a fruitful harvest. Gallant’s work sets the tone for a magical, almost spiritual journey that unfolds through the galleries. The ghosts of Newstead Abbey’s monks sing to us from between ancient yew trees in Arianne Churchman’s moving image installation ‘In the Ghost of the Forest We Hear Them Sing’ (2025) . We have trespassed here, through a portal of time and magic, where we might consider what it means to share ownership of places we inhabit and the stories we tell about them. Tree spirits, ‘Dryads’ (2025) sculpted by Tach Pollard from hawthorn and oak, witness the visitors’ procession through the exhibition.
I feel a certain sacred melancholy emanating from the gallery walls, one that reflects a global ecological anxiety around preservation and conservation. Georgianna Scurfield’s documentary, ‘Forest and Frequency’ (2024-5), alongside research undertaken by University of Nottingham highlights the stewardship of these landscapes. It feels fitting to explore these themes in the context of the museum where contemplative parallels can be drawn between forest, museum, church; each a site of reverence, ritual, and silence, but also of power. They preserve while enclosing, shaping what is remembered and what is forgotten. In this light, the forest becomes not only a place of ecological grief but perhaps a mirror to institutional fragility.
“Just let it die” seems to be the request that echoes off Yelena Popova’s ‘After the Major Oak (Proposal for Letting Go)’ (2025). Popova’s textile work is a beautiful meditation on dignity in accepting death, and envisions the potential for new beginnings born from the void that will one day be left by the dying Major Oak, a tree now kept alive for a century with iron crutches and wire cables. Woven with images of ouroboros and white lace butterflies, Popova’s textile points to cycles of death and renewal.
A nearby text panel quietly busts some of the myths we hold dear: this tree we imagine as ancient and untamed had long stood alone in a field, many of the surrounding giants little more than a century old. The Major Oak, once a symbol of boundless nature, is revealed as a sick body propped up, curated, and consumed. It is hard not to draw parallels with other things we insist on keeping alive long after they should have been allowed to rest.
Opposite, Jelly Green’s paintings offer a stark counterpoint: influenced by recent wildfires in Los Angeles and New Zealand, scorched earth and the violence of climate collapse. Taken together, ‘Forest and Flames’ (2025) moves between local myth and global catastrophe, showing how our stories of trees can both soothe and blind us, even as flames advance.
In the centre of the room on a low raised plinth is ‘The Fallen Leaves’ (2025) by Tim Fowler and Graeme Hawes. Glass leaves in psychedelic colours and patterns call to mind the sublime delicate beauty and fragility of nature. Placed alongside images of wildfire and ecological collapse, Fowler and Hawe’s glass leaves risk tipping into preciousness, their fragility is beautiful but also frustratingly decorative. I get the most powerful urge to step on them, to feel the glass crunch under my human feet.
Jasper Goodall’s ‘Verdent’ (2022) is a series of photographs that, at first glance, resemble casual snapshots of woodland life. Look closer, and each image is in fact, a careful construction: individual specimens are meticulously collaged together to represent the broader biodiversity of a region. These fabricated forest floors evoke the 17th-century Dutch Old Masters, whose still-life depictions of mosses, fungi, and insects emerged during a moment of fervent scientific classification and a colonial desire to catalogue and claim the natural world. Goodall’s work echoes that history while also unsettling it, showing that every act of representation is also an act of framing and, perhaps, of possession.
If Goodall hints at the dangers of possession through representation, Jennie Syson’s linocut ‘Rex Nemorensis’ (2025) delivers a more explicit warning. Returning to the legend of the priest-king whose rule depended on breaking a sacred branch and killing his predecessor, Syson shows human figures caught within the tree itself, as though absorbed after failing to take the branch. The work casts the forest as both a sanctuary and an executioner. A place where the pursuit of power carries its own curse.
Caroline Locke’s ‘The Major Oak Projects’ (2025) is perhaps the most explicit attempt to capture the true ‘voices’ of trees. In collaboration with scientists from the University of Nottingham, she gathered the frequencies, or subtle vibrations and resonances, of the Major Oak, translating this data into sound as a way of listening to what usually lies beyond human hearing. Yet the project falters: a bell large enough to simulate the resonance of the ancient oak cannot be made – no foundry in the world could make it, nor could it be rung without causing a major global catastrophe. What remains is a tuning fork that vibrates rapidly, its song beyond our hearing. Trees communicate through mycelial networks and other systems that unfold on scales of time and sound outside our grasp. Rather than translating their language, Locke emphasises its unknowability. The work lingers as an experiment in failure—an eloquent one, but also a reminder of the limits of translating ecological data into art.
At times, the exhibition leans towards enchantment, risking the softening of its message of ecological urgency, yet the strongest works hold these contradictions in tension. FOREST is a portal. One that asks us to consider trespass and permission, land and commons, power and belonging. Romanticism, folklore and human interventions run throughout the exhibition, but again and again the works return us to a simple provocation: what would the trees say about us, given the chance? To truly understand them, as Syson’s linocut suggests, we might have to become them. Absorbed into their silence, relinquishing power in favour of dwelling within.
From MacCallum’s sunset oak to Locke’s resonant bells, the works gathered here gesture towards grief, reverence, and the uneasy weight of human intervention. Just as the Castle once stood at the heart of Sherwood Forest, so too does the exhibition position us within this living legacy. The forest, museum, and church collapse into one another.
I leave with Mo Zhou’s sound walk ‘Echoes of the Forest’ (2025) in my ears, speculating on the forest that once lined the Castle walls a thousand years ago. Outside the gates, I find myself wondering what stories will whisper through the leaves yet to come.
Wingshan is an artist, curator, and witch based in Nottingham.
FOREST is on at Nottingham Castle, Nottingham until 5th October 2025.
This review is supported by Nottingham Castle.
Published 24.09.2025 by Rachel Graves in Reviews
1,469 words
