In November 2021 Emily Coghlan spent ten days in Scotland researching a new interdisciplinary photography project, with the working title ‘Bleeding Yew’. For one weekend Emily stayed with a filmmaker and academic, and three Woodland Trust foresters. They explored their developing ‘Croft’ (a unique farm land ownership system) on Morvern in the Highlands. Emily learnt about timber plantation destruction, in contrast to diverse and thriving ancient woodland ecosystems and the ethics of habitat forming and carbon offsetting.

The central tenet of the project is the idea of arboreal murder; that the trees of our time are both figuratively and literally dying. Emily paints trees with a deep red beetroot dye and documents her intervention in the landscape with 120mm photography. The photographs on her website show her initial experimentation (Nov 2020), and could be considered the ‘maquettes’ of the project.