THE NEW YEW

by Hattie Ellis (Salisbury)

The arts centre raises £4m to survive. But a 200-year-old yew must be felled for a building to make its long-term future safe. 44 artists make pieces from the tree; the work is shown and recorded in an artists’ book bound in slabs of the wood.

One participant, Julie the Potter, tells how on hot Saturdays, she’d take her troupe to work beneath the tree’s shade, with goldcrests on the top and pigeons down below. Twigs and feathers would get stuck in the clay. The berries glowed.

She made a sculpture of those times. When the children got restive, she’d say: “Be Eros!” And they’d leap up to balance on the bollards below the boughs, arms out with the arrows of love, like the longbows once made from cemetery yews.

After the exhibition of the felled yew – poems made of wooden letters, furniture, woodcuts, soaring sculptures, a hat stand – Julie gathered the sawdust up in bags. Somewhere in the dark, seedlings germinated. She gave me one. I watch it grow.

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What Hattie Ellis says about THE NEW YEW:

This was inspired by Salisbury’s vibrant arts centre where people of alls ages and walks of life gather. Julie, the potter in residence, was there when the disused medieval church of St Edmund’s become Salisbury Arts Centre, and has seen it pass through various funding crises over the years. In 2004, the difficult decision was made to cut down an old yew tree in order to build offices for an expansion that would give the Centre a more certain future.