In collaboration with Wendy Kirkup
The work responds to Orcadian poet and experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait’s Aerial (1974) and departs from Paynter’s classroom exercises in the spirit of Aerial; a way of exploring light and sound guided by people who instinctively create through play to discover what the materials can do. The film and its soundtrack were created through a series of workshops whereby the children recorded their own sounds and created their own graphic scores, as a way of hearing instruments being played with and a world of sonorous possibility emerging in the ear of the recording artists.
The Forest of Everything is a difficult work to describe. As with Aerial, and as it is with play, it may be best understood if you “allow yourself to respond to it instead of trying to follow it intellectually” (Tait, 2021).