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Acorn Lore was a site-specific installation for the 16th Century Mint House  in Pevensey – a deeply historic part of southern England. 

 

The Mint House is a centre for folklore. Folklore speaks of the interaction between humans and the natural world, and the stories told by the former revealing their love, awe and respect for the latter.  The Mint House’s  beams, posts and other internal structures are made from oak trees. 

 

Acorn Lore involves  six interactive artworks dotted across the ground floor, reimagining the building as a posthumous forest. It time-travels back to when the building's  posts and beams were acorns, inviting the building to tell its own story through the dendrochronology cores sampled by Historic England in 2024.  These samples (cores taken from the wood structure), reveal how the tree grew from being an acorn sapling, what its stresses were as it matured and when it was felled.  They also reveal how different parts of the Mint House are actually part of the same tree.

 

Acorn Lore is  a mini walking tour around the building. These overlaid stories (or fabulas) are encountered  via 21st century media and materials.  QR codes embossed onto oak coasters, which are attached to giant acorns (bird feeders), which  are suspended using recently coppiced tree branches from the holes where the dendrochronology samples were taken.

 

It also includes a 2025 acorn sapling as a hope for the future of oak trees.

 

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