Chinese Arboretum A selection of one hundred images of Chinese trees make up this ongoing billboard project. We are gradually finding public sites for billboard sized images of individual trees to be displayed. The title of each photograph is taken from the life of someone living near to the tree. In the summer of 2004, working with S1 Artspace in Sheffield and JC Decaux, two of the series were sited on billboards in Sheffield. Out near the Sheffield Arena there’s a recycling tip. Thousands of people pass it everyday but you wouldn’t know it was there unless you wound down a window and breathed the chemicals, or lost your way and turned around on the slip-road that takes you there. Perhaps some people found Chinese Arboretum 91 this way. The image of a slight, yellow tree in dense forest foliage appeared for a couple of weeks on the billboard space next to the tip, above the tatty piece of pavement the drivers use to off load the skips. Once when I was there a man appeared and started photographing the road and then turned around and began photographing the billboard. He said it was his job to record the adverts, he had come to take pictures of the giant trio of hoardings next to the road but turned around because he’d never seen anything like it, he said it was beautiful.
| |
 | |
