Inscription / Interruption
/
By Ellie Ballantine
Where we live now
the forest meets us
at the door
speckled wood butterflies
force their bodies
against the hard border
of the window
an untransformable edge
pine sap
spreads a translucent glaze
on shirts left on the line
strung between two cypress
a little out of place
April. An oak leafs out
fills the bedroom window
ten seconds view
reveals a swallow resting
on its western branch
a crow
inscribes a sooty line
smudges a white sky
broken open
by heat
chasing a buzzard
away from blue-green eggs
outside
and oak blossoms
land on keys
as I type this
chevaux de frise
about a hundred
strung across the hillside
a line of fallen teeth
the remains of a fallen village
I can’t see things more closely
mother-hooded
my eyes
must spread themselves
thinly
mapping through anticipation
over each domestic risk
can’t get to the nub
of anything
but this.
Another layer of seed, of dust, of leaves, of song
on place
on us.
Ellie Ballantine is an artist, researcher and writer based in the Scottish Borders. Her creative practice and research explores forests, the temporalities of conservation and the long durational lives of mosses, lichens and trees. She is interested in finding practices that open up questions of how to live more carefully in consideration of the temporal experiences of others, human and more-than-human. Her recent writing navigates cumulative experiences of place, across seasons and across years, as a means of self-orientation within wider ecologies and histories. She is also interested in how new topographies of place emerge when a body becomes unwell or is altered through caring for another body, such as when carrying a child.
She has written about her creative practice and its engagement with plants, presenting a paper on alternative photographic processes and Rhododendron ponticum at the Royal Geographical Society: IBG conference (2025). Her writing on field recording and tree time was published in the sound art journal Row of Trees (2024).