ST LEONARDS ON SEA.- An Arboretum in the general sense is a botanical collection, composed exclusively of trees. Historically botanical illustrators and artists have studied plants to describe different species and their formations and characteristics. Hastings is home to one of the largest Arboretums' in the UK, at Alexandra Park which has one of the best collections of trees in Britain, originally planted by Robert Marnock (1800–1889) who was one of the outstanding English horticulturalists and garden designers of the 19th century.

This exhibition of works by Zoe Sim, Kirsten Reynolds, John Stezaker, Jean-luc Brouard, Allan Grainger, Faith Powell, Melissa Moore, Ieuan Morris, and Kristof Szentgyorgyvary explores contemporary photographic practice using various lighting, film and digital processes to produce a contemporary photographic arboretum.

Allan Grainger’s work “Arbor Mysterium” is a body of work that has emerged over 18 years spent walking at night along the old paths and bridleways of East Sussex “ Being out in the country at night without artificial light was for centuries commonplace; few today have experienced an environment without some type of artificial light”

Zoe Sim’s, digital infrared photography over saturates treescapes into pink worlds. False-colour infrared photography has a dark history, as it was invented for war camouflage detection in the 1940s,her images hint towards a "futuristic environment where technology is beginning to seep into nature and appears to be malfunctioning at times”

Ieuan Morris's studies of ancient Yew trees on the northern slopes of the Brecon Beacons are compelling, suggesting a "molten flow as well as anatomical features" reminiscent of the fleshy studies of classical paintings.

John Stezaker's 'Tree' series are symmetrical mirror images of the boles of trees from the pocket book of British trees which he hegan in the 1990s. Later in the early 2000's, he returned to the series using (unusually) his own photographs of urban tree boles.

"I remember thinking that the reflective seam was a way of thinking about collage in a digital age. The cut was virtual. By making it reflective, it seemed a way of looking at that divide between different orders of the image - giving the reflection (the image) an equal footing with the real"

While Kirsten Reynolds light drawings made during “the destabilizing hours of darkness” and have an atmosphere of instance"

Our relationship with nature is constantly changing and from this contemporary study of trees offers a new position to evaluate our place within it.