Dryads - The tree-bound

The ancient Greek stories of the dryads, or forest nymphs, are full of drama, beauty and anthropomorphised ways of explaining the mythical or inexplicable in the natural world. The dryads were honoured as semi-godlike female spirits inhabiting trees and groves, often bound in such a way that their life itself was tied to the life of the trees. Many older cultures and religions show a similar reverence for nature, with beings akin to the dryads guarding trees and forests. In common for all was a respect for and belief in the sanctity of life of our natural surroundings, that to a large degree has been lost today. Creating this ongoing project around these mythical beings is for me a way to lift the stories into our time, and remind people that our lives, like the dryads’, are equally bound to the life of the natural world. We as humans need to wake up to the fact that we have become reliant upon natural resources to the point of destroying the foundation of what we need to live.