Ghost Forest Installation, 2024

Including a collaboration with Scandinavian fiddle player, Mira Dickey, who performed in the space.

On view in All Else, MFA Studio Art Thesis Exhibition
Visual Arts Center, University of Texas, Austin, TX
April 19 – May 11, 2024

Installation Statement:

Last summer I traveled to Bornholm Island in Denmark to celebrate Midsommar. Walking through a pine plantation, I discovered an ancient standing stone in a forest clearing. I sketched the stone and listened to birdsongs on the breeze, subtly acclimating to the slower pace of the forest. Months later in the studio I recalled the experience, reimagining the site through monotypes. My memories became shaped by my emotions, and the resulting artwork blends both inner and outer realms with the printmaking transfer process, resulting in another world of its own.

In Memory of Stone, I used bodily memory to remember the scale of the standing stone. My hands remembered the texture and I used my height to recall how tall it stood. To create these life-size monotypes, I used the 3 x 5 foot bed of the press as my printmaking plate. In my efforts to remember the stone, I created multiple versions. Two are created from ghost prints of the others, and in sequence they resemble a variable edition. However, subtle shifts distinguish them as individual monotypes and in multiple their intentions are amplified. They are the documented residue of recalled memories, like handmade photographs. Each of these five standing stones holds a different piece of my memories but needs the others to be complete. Together these fractured memories form a new stone alignment.

The pine plantation surrounding the original site seemed eerie with its lack of vegetal variety. It was at once cavernous and dense. To activate a similar space around the standing stone prints, I created the large veil monotypes that make up Ghost Forest. To print each 11 x 5 foot monotype on the 3 x 5 foot press, I worked modularly, building one large image out of multiple prints on voile fabric. Grey voile fabric was chosen for its translucent and lightweight material, causing the prints to come to life and shift when the viewer walks past. Descending from the ceiling, the veil monotypes create a space of transition one must walk through to get to the stones. Here the background becomes the foreground. The spaces between them allow glimpses of the stones, inspired by the myriad paths trees create in the forest. The veils appear different depending on the vantage point and the lighting enhances this effect. When the well-lit stones are behind them, the trees are less visible. When viewed from the stone monotypes, the translucent forest stands out against the shadows of the room beyond, creating a ghostly plane.

Ghost Forest Installation can be read via geologic time. The stone monotypes are printed on the most solid substrate in the show, paper, and displayed against the wall. They represent geologic time, which changes at the slowest pace. The trees are printed on transparent veils, representing their time scale, which moves faster than geologic time. The people experiencing the work within the space move on the human scale of time, quickly navigating the space. The memories of my experience of the original Hellig Hågen site move quickest of all, as they are the most fleeting.