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Kurt JACKSON
(b. 1961)
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‘Forest Gardens’: it sounds like a contradiction. You might as well imagine ‘Cottage Jungles’ or ‘Farmed Chaos’. The wilderness and the cultivated plot are archetypal opposites, symbols of a stand-off between nature and culture that goes back 10,000 years. But we’re prisoners of our own narrow concepts here. Harvested forests, forests nudged, pruned, picked over, existed long before the invention of agriculture. The chestnut grove and the apple orchard represent ancient compromises between the worlds of the hunter-gatherer and the farmer, places where humans can provide for themselves without obliterating whole ecosystems.
They’re a compelling subject for Kurt Jackson, whose work has persistently championed the idea that humans can be participants in natural systems, not just external manipulators.
What is exceptional about these paintings is that few of them are composed in a conventional sense. There are no obvious foregrounds, no distant prospects artfully framed by trees. At times they have an almost two-dimensional feel, as if, in the moment of painting, nothing else exists except this plane of living tissue. They celebrate the biological fact that the true life - and liveliness - of these places is in the air, where the magic of photosynthesis creates green tissue from light and carbon dioxide, where the sun’s rays open the flowers and ripen the fruit.
Kurt’s approach reflects the central principle of forest farming, that the ecosystem itself - not some planned, manipulated, composed environment - is the true subject of the working landscape. In a world in peril from mass extinctions and land shortages and abuses of industrial agriculture, the forest gardens’ gentle alternative of shared living space and shared perspectives is urgently due for a renaissance.
Extract from the foreword by Richard Mabey
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