KATY McGAHAN
 

Untitled Photo etchings, 2011 - 2015

 

I've always been a walker, even as a kid, me and my best mates, Janet and Judity Maiden (twins) would go on long walks, with no plan - just an open attitude and wait to see who and what we might encounter. I'm still a walker,  whether in towns and cities or in the countryside - and I document the things I encounter along the way. I grew up in a small town in Cheshire in the northwest of England in a neighbourhood known as The Bluebell after the Bluebell Woods that existed back then, unfortunately they have since been built over. Playing in those woods when I was a kid and seeing the huge swathes of bluebells that appeared every spring really inspired a life-long love of trees and other plants - and a sense that green spaces like those magical woods were very fragile and always under threat. 

 

When I first started making drawings and etchings of trees back in 2011 at Camden Workingmen's College, I quickly realised that trees draw themselves. Branches, stems and leaves grow outwards from the trunk to form intricate patterns of sharply defined graphite-like lines and softer clusters of dusted charcoal.

 

So - I like to regard the below tree images as photo-etchings made by me of self-portraits made by trees.