Hedge, 2017, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, triptych, 105 x 250 cm / 130 x 320 cm

The several-hundred-year-old hedge raises blunt questions about identity, perception, and cognition. How can we speak of the same hedge across centuries when the assemblage, likely a community of yews, keeps changing, its parts replaced, its details and form drifting? Yew (Taxus baccata) makes the riddle tangible. It can grow an aerial root, bury it, and thicken it into a new trunk, repeating this for centuries until its age becomes undecidable. No wonder yews have accrued layered meanings: among Celts and Druids they signified longevity and passage. In medieval Britain they marked churchyards, binding death and resurrection to the landscape. Later, yew and box shaped Renaissance topiary and mazes, then softened into English landscape horizons. Hedgerows themselves are cultural artifacts, living boundaries of the commons and the enclosures, and today ecological corridors. Our cognition, tuned to short spans and discrete objects, misreads this slow composition. We see the “same” hedge because tradition, care, and place confer identity as much as biology does. The yew’s poisonous leaves and evergreen patience hold the paradox in view, a living body that endures by replacing itself, a monument whose material is change.

Hedge, 2017, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, triptych, 105 x 250 cm / 130 x 320 cm, detail

Hedge, 2017, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, triptych, 105 x 250 cm / 130 x 320 cm, detail

Hedge, 2017, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, triptych, 105 x 250 cm / 130 x 320 cm, detail

installation view: Hypothesis: Everything is Leaf, Robert Capa Contemporary, Budapest, Hungary, 2022

Hedge, 2017, installation view: Hypothesis: Everything is Leaf, Foto Wien, Atelier Augarten, Vienna, Austria, 2022