Inside the Workshop: Forest + Found

In the realm of art, there exists a select group of creators who harmonize with the natural world. 'Forest + Found', a collective established by artists Abigail Booth and Max Bainbridge, epitomizes this ethos. They are renowned for crafting artwork that seamlessly melds art, craft and nature. For the duo, their artistic process starts with stuff that many of us might disregard; fallen trees, discarded textiles and other found objects all await Booth and Bainbridge’s touch, to be reinvented into artworks that reflect both our contemporary and past lives.

“If you ask us what we’re trying to do, it would be to have a conversation around the nature of materiality. It’s about what the artwork says of a certain place and time and the way they connect with people,” Booth says from the couple’s studio at the foot of the Mendip hills of Somerset, England. Her husband and collaborator Bainbridge sits by her side while their dog, Gimli, is perched on her lap.

In the world of Forest + Found, Booth’s work spans textiles, print-making and painting: she creates her quilted pieces by hand-stitching and patchworking her canvases from reclaimed textiles, which are printed and dyed in natural pigments. Bainbridge, meanwhile, is a sculptor, working predominantly in wood with trees that have reached the end of their natural lifespan.

Forest + Found is where visual art, craft and a deep respect and reliance on nature intersect. “It is about telling a bigger story and that’s why we choose to collaborate with each other,” Booth explains. “People are used to the idea of these binary worlds – craft and art – but we enjoy occupying that place in between,” Bainbridge offers thoughtfully. “Traditional craft is influential in our practice because the history of craft is rooted in the land and in people, and our work is about exploring that,” says Booth, picking up from her husband.

The pair’s artistic process uses 100 percent natural or reclaimed materials, they maintain a ‘no-waste’ approach and when sourcing material they look at what is close at hand. “It’s interesting because this approach came about through necessity,” says Bainbridge.

It was 2013, and the pair had just finished studying at the Chelsea College of Art in London. “We had bills to pay and it was a time when the financial crash was still in memory. We were very much set on developing our artistic practices and taking forward what we had learned from school, but it was a question of ‘what do we have around us that is readily available?’,” Bainbridge reflected. With limited resources, they looked to their immediate locality in north-east London, an area with a long history of textile manufacturing bordered by Epping Forest, an ancient woodland owned by the city that covers 6,000 acres.

Through happenstance, Bainbridge met people working in the forestry division who had had the foresight to keep some trees accessible to local artists. Soon, Bainbridge was driving the couple’s old Volvo to the forest and loading up on storm-felled oak, beech and birch. “It was the first time I’d worked with actual trees, and it was profound. They’d come to me in all these unusual shapes. It made me start to understand the tree itself as a living entity,” Bainbridge said.

There’s been no looking back since, with Bainbridge using the trees in their entirety and turning them into objects and sculptures. He has also accrued a unique set of skills of reading and understanding the material. “I can spend entire days or weeks even, physically turning a piece that then has to sit for months slowly drying and moving to then be stable enough for me to finish it. This period of drying out is when the material gives back. It will warp and crack, with each species of tree reacting differently, bringing out its unique identity,” Bainbridge explains.

For Booth, working within the constraints of a tiny studio led her to discover her local London textile market, which would equally change her trajectory. “It struck me that here was this natural material, cloth, that was rooted in locality and culture,” Booth said. “It also allowed me to work on a large scale and was relatively affordable in comparison to paints.”

In the intervening time, Booth taught herself patchwork and quilting from books and was soon sourcing textiles from her local market. From there, Booth has gone on to seek out second-hand textiles, bearing the marks of their former lives, which she naturally dyes, prints and hand stitches into her quilted works. “I’m endlessly fascinated by how there is so much social history in quilt making and textiles. We all have a close personal relationship with textiles because we physically wear them, we sleep in them, we’re vulnerable and intimate in them.” Booth says of her work.

Nature is never far from her mind either, “natural textiles are from the land itself, so I’m interested in how the land has always nurtured humanity, and the necessity for us to now re-learn how we can nurture the land back.” For Booth, part of her work involves exploring the landscape and its geology. She looks for naturally occurring pigments extracted from the bark and roots of trees, natural ochres ground down and washed out of rocks, and grows dye plants for her textiles and paintings.

Speaking more broadly of their work, Booth and Bainbridge reflect that it may have taken some time, but they’re finally where they want to be, in the direction they are taking their creative practice. “I think we feel lucky every day here to be creating this work, and telling these stories. Hopefully, it’s just the start,” Booth says.

Photography: Forest + Found, Alun Callender, Ed Schofield