Forest Songs is three love songs to the Dublin Forests with accompanying videos in collaboration with award winning composer Tom Lane. The lyrics and melody of each song are built from interviews we conducted at Ticknock and Carrigoligan, asking people who use the woods what draws them there, what it changes in them, and what we need to protect for the future. The videos feature macro photography of the detail of life in the woods, the layers of species from the forest floor to the sky and the rhythms of the landscape they expose. Commissioned as part of Nature and Place through the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Arts Office.

Our work is always focused on the power of action now to change the patterns of the future. What we can see is that there is a profound value in reconnecting with Nature, that's the first seed of love, and that love will ultimately help us to protect it. For those who already spend time in the forest the music is a kind of mirror for their experience, we hope. And sometimes all it takes it to pay attention in a new way to change how you thing and feel about something. 

Many of the conversations were with people who could identify the deep need for the healing connection that being out in Nature offers. Mental health, anxiety, the stress and pressure of urban life. These ideas came up time and time again and for us really connected the intention of the project to the immediate context. We see the isolation that sets in for most people with the disconnect of online life. There's a pain that grows from that loneliness. Out in the woods and in Nature people are able to breath and build their senses again.  

There was another lovely moment speaking with Forester Bill Murphy who describes the need for re-wilding and wild places. He quoted the philosopher Aldo Leopold in saying that the effort of returning land to a wild state as "building receptivity in the yet unloving mind". And I think that echos what we are up to in this project maybe; we're returning some of the instincts people have in seeking out the forest and seeking out nature to a wild state, a musical place of feeling. 

Three songs have been composed by Tom Lane and the lyrics and melody for each have been written and sung by Maeve Stone. We were interested in the tension between the familiar when it is reframed. Maeve has worked on a number of verbatim song cycles that work with interview material from real people. When you use words from an actual conversation to form lyrics it forces you to listen to the answer in a new way. It reframes something that could feel mundane and it tunes your ear in to it as something new. There's also a beautiful universality in the emotional language of music. It doesn't matter what age you are! So the collaboration with Tom Lane has been a lovely thing to explore and expose the potential for that language in a natural setting. What is the musical character of the woods. What is the tonal quality of a mushroom or a Merlin. All of those questions are really inviting as an artist and we hope are just as inviting to an audience, some of whom will hear their own words again in a completely new frame.