This year has been so hard but I feel really good about my new project! It has been in the study and work it through phase for a quite a while and now I am making good progress. So, I’d like to introduce to you
the Ghost Forest - Out of the Ashes
Last fall, with wildfires raging on the west coast, our sky yellow-gray from smoke, and unable to breathe, I felt sick at the loss of forest lands and began to wonder how I could make something from the destruction. It came to me that by collecting ash from the fires I could then create carbon prints, transforming the charred wood into recorded images of the forests themselves. It is for this reason I use the carbon print process that was invented in 1855 and is considered the most archival of all printing processes as it contains no silver. Carbon, or soot, does not fade. Instead, the trees become the photographs, in an anticipation of natural regeneration after a fire. The process does encourage images to tear and frill on their edges, a property I use in my unique photographs.
Printed as lantern slides, the forest memory is held captive on sheets of glass accentuating both the fragility of life and our precarious position due to climate change. This is the Ghost Forest – Out of the Ashes. When installed, the Ghost Forest moves photography off the wall and into the middle of the room. Hung from the ceiling on pairs of cables that suggest the outline of the trees, the viewer is invited to wander through glimpsing all stages in the life of a forest; small understory flowers, historical logging, dappled light in the trees as well as the aftereffects of fire.
My intention is to transform the devastation from the sick panic of needing to evacuate to one of beauty with awareness. So far, I have collected ash from 5 different fires with travel to several other sites scheduled. In the U.S., there have been an average of 70,000 wildfires each year for the last 10 years. On completion the Ghost Forest will have 70 trees, each picture worth a 1000 fires.
