The forty-five minutes of calm instilled by Sylvia Rimat’s gentle and immersive woodland audio-walk is potentially so restorative it should be part of every school’s extramural plans and feature on everyone’s to do list.

Rimat is an artist who likes to bring science and sentiment together to better explore the physical and emotional worlds we live in.  With headphones on and ipods activated, we follow her into the deep green of Leigh Woods, a two-kilometre square nature reserve on the south side of the Avon Gorge. An ethereal soundtrack accompanies Rimat’s soothing voice as it invites us to look, to touch, to smell the vegetation, even to taste (if you want) the earth that we learn is home to miles of fungal tubing, a veritable tree internet in constant communication with itself. The forest is alive and it is aware. Now we are too.

Standing below tall and perfectly straight conifers, Rimat encourages us to imagine the neurological forests in our brains, how the branch shapes are strikingly similar. And while the one holds and nurtures wildlife, the other is doing the same for memories and imagination. Rimat’s skill is to make us think in different dimensions, arming us with biology that illustrates the way that trees live communally and symbiotically with the fungi that supply their vital sugars, while using them as metaphors for message highways – the way we build and retain our own brain maps, our store of thoughts.

There are moments where Rimat speaks of her own childhood growing up on the edge of the Black Forest in Germany and how that memory persists within her like a deeply etched message that sustains her through life. And she draws on others’ stories, memories or experiences of woodland in which moments of humour, freedom and magic are released.

We walk further into the wood and come up against an ancient yew tree. Hundreds of years old, its thick multiple reddish trunks reach up into the grey Bristol sky. Here Rimat urges us to contemplate the folklore behind this ancient evergreen. And in a sensitive and imaginative way reminds us of our lives passing back to the soil before she leaves us in utter stillness just to listen to what is around us, and appreciate those we are experiencing this with, just for this moment, before we are gone.   ★★★★☆     Simon Bishop    4^th October 2019