Intervention in the Woods: An Installation Co-created with Existing Trees

Design a public artwork inserted into an existing woodland, taking the trees as its structure and its subject. Show a continuous horizontal band of mirror-polished stainless steel, six hundred millimetres tall, threading between the trunks of a mature beech wood at a consistent height of one and a half metres above the ground, running for perhaps eighty metres in a meandering line and passing around each trunk it meets without ever touching it. Detail the gap between band and bark as constant, a deliberate fifty millimetres at every trunk, so the band clearly negotiates the trees rather than being fixed to them, supported instead by thin posts driven into the ground between them. Show the mirror surface as reflecting the forest floor, the leaf litter and the lower trunks in a continuous distorted horizontal strip, so the woodland appears to be cut through and displaced at that one level. Detail the band as visually dissolving where it reflects a bright patch of ground and reappearing as a hard bright line where it crosses shadow, so it is continuously appearing and vanishing along its length. Show dappled light falling across it. Detail the untouched woodland above and below. Set it in a mature deciduous wood. Photorealistic, elusive, mirrored line among grey trunks, low eye-level view along the band.