Saving Calderstones – Trees Under Threat

Saving Calderstones – Trees Under Threat

Photography exhibition by John Davies
Output Gallery, 32 Seel Street (Next to The Kazimier Garden)
1st – 4th November 2018

Reviewed by Tom Bottle

There is a building site in town a mate tells me, where a rabbit is living being fed by passers-by and residing in a hutch the workmen have built for it. “If it was 30 rabbits” he said, “they would have exterminated them”. Yeah, there is something about being the only one, isn’t there.

John Davies has captured it in his twenty odd black and white portraits of individual trees which will be destroyed if Liverpool city council plans to build luxury houses in Calderstones Park go ahead.

Portraits, (a lovely word as if a tree had a personality), ‘made in the infrared spectrum to reveal a quality of tree life that can’t be seen with the naked eye’. The effects are magical and other worldly, tree after tree, eucalyptus, beech, weeping ash and sweet chestnut.

“I hope to motivate people into being actively involved in changes that will have a direct or indirect impact on our urbanized lives”, says Davies on his handy leaflet explaining the why, what and how of his contribution to the LOGS (Liverpool Open Green Spaces) campaign. “Most of us can identify with images of trees. We have some emotional, physical or visual connection that brings us closer to the natural environment.”

After the dramatic visual impact of every individual tree how can anyone think of destroying over a hundred of them. Take a tip from the rabbit lads, spread out, stand alone, get noticed. So far over 20,000 people have signed a petition to save trees and green spaces in the city.

LOGS are taking their case to the High Court in Manchester. Check their site www.logscic.org.uk for John Davies Photographs and the latest developments.

See the press for the council’s view reported as the high council tax receipts 51 luxury houses will bring, as well as disputing the space is public parkland.

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