Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast · Fermynwoods Contemporary Art

Fermynwoods Podcast 18 - Danny Treacy & Johannes Zits

February 17, 2023·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Danny Treacy uses photogrammetry to uncover hidden love carvings on trees, transforming dismissed marks into profound social records.

Tree Wilder begins as a walk. Marie Chantal Hamrock, presenting with Subterra, places the episode inside xylophobia, where woodland, forest, and underground spaces become the setting for artist talk and commissioned sound. It has a quiet unease to it. The conversation does not hurry to explain the work. It stays with pieces made by Danny Tracy and Johannes Sitz for the Tree Wilder exhibition at Barnwell Park, and the place keeps pressing on everything they say. The exhibition is described as site-responsive, with sculpture, video work, and interventions that send visitors through the woods in autumn and winter. Tracy comes at it through people first. He is interested in territories where people gather because there is nowhere else to go, and where community keeps going in fragile ways under social exclusion. The woods are not treated as pretty scenery. In the excerpted exchange, dense holly and difficult paths affect how people find privacy, get lost, and arrive in a hidden clearing. A woodland cruising ground comes up, but the conversation handles it carefully. It sounds like a lived social place, with routine, memory, and informal history, not a spectacle. One detail widens the frame: men who know the area suggest the space may have existed for at least 200 years. Covid changes the feel of that history. As other spaces closed, the woodland was used more often, and the episode notices how a landscape can take in social pressure without becoming neutral. Johannes answers through sensation. He describes being surrounded by a tree as if held inside its core, with hanging growth forming something like a warm wrap. That softens the whole subject. What first sounds hidden becomes about comfort, enclosure, and the odd hospitality of natural forms. The host lets that sit, which suits the episode. This is a slow artist conversation about woodland, marginality, and places that were never formally made to welcome anyone, but still do.

As heard by us

A woodland art conversation that keeps site, process, and social use in close view.

The episode stays in the woodland setting as Marie Chantal Hamrock speaks with Danny Tracy and Johannes Sitz about Tree Wilder, with its site-responsive interventions, sculptures, and video for Barnwell Park.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want art talk that walks straight into the woods.

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