Deep in the Forest

Artist E.G.Hall and I both work with a sensitivity to the expanse of time and the breadth of nature. E.G writes, “My work is an exploration of time and growth in varying scales. Like the paradox of the coastline, where the more closely one measures the coast, the longer the measurement becomes; the similarities between the human body, technology, and nature are infinite. In other words: we are just fast trees. As I expand the time scale I reference in my work, I learn that my experiences are physically present in my body just as a century-old earthquake is present in a landscape, a drought in a tree, a volcanic eruption in a rock.

Like E.G., I also experience the physicality of nature within me, as I dissolve into a billion cells and transpire into the world around me. I work to repair from within, but it is mere mimicry. Making art, I walk, and work in collaboration with the land, its inhabitants, and features. I lose myself in the unending sweep of time and minutae. I attempt mimicry and repairs of a broken world, usually without success, as nature is vast and smarter than me, and the thicket that is relationship between humans and our environment is one entanglement.

I am entangled in nature.  I feel so alive in the remote and quiet places and am reawakened to the lives within and around us. This series was created at an artist residency in Swedish Lapland. There, I made several attempts to call attention to and to heal the destruction created by unregulated clearcutting of the boreal forest. I “rewove” the fallen bark from the cut trees, and stayed still until the birds thought I belonged. I listened to the tall spruce, and pine, and larch, swayed with the birch trees, and sat quietly with the lichen and the vast mycorrhizal network that nurtures the growth of the forest. They listened to me and comforted me, and I offered the same in return.