Interactive online artwork using photographs taken during a one-month artist residency at Visual Arts in Rural Communities, partnered with the Kielderhead Wildwood Project, Northumberland Wildlife Trust, UK. The wildwood project are planting 39,000 native trees in an area near Kielder village, close to the Scottish-English border in England

The tubes protecting the trees became a symbol during the residency of the human hand in this planting. while trees need a canopy to grow healthy, this is a small token that is offered to the trees by humans that are trying to do right by them, by way of protection. This wildwood is not forest for future timber, it is being planted to remain for future generations of trees, humans and wildlife.

What will the trees tell their future children and grandchildren? how will they explain what it was like to spend their first ten years inside a tube, never feeling the air, reaching up toward the sky?

‘Macalla’ is the Irish Gaeilge word for an ‘echo’, literally translated as ‘the child of a shout’

This project was supported by VARC, the Kielderhead Wildwood Project and a travel and training grant from the Arts Council of Ireland