This is my fourth forest installation inspired by the idea of finding yourself in a clearing in the forest—and my second immersive one. Clearly, I’m obsessed. I can’t stop thinking about woodlands, both as metaphor and as the literal woodlands. Why woodlands? So many reasons, which I’ll get into in a minute (for anyone who cares to read further). One thing I love about being in the woods is how that environment takes me both into myself and out of myself. Sometimes, examining the life clinging to the underside of a piece of bark strips away the version of me that worries about other people’s opinions, the endless to-do list, the guilt of past mistakes. In the woods, I’m simply a living organism among other living organisms. I just exist—and if I didn’t, the woods would go on existing anyway. Oddly, there’s comfort in knowing that although the woods holds meaning for me, I hold none for it.
If you visit the installation, you’ll notice shredded paper scattered across the floor — and you’re invited to shred your own documents and add them to the piece. You may also notice that some of my sculptures contain fragments of text: photocopied pages from my old journals, cut into unreadable strips. The paper, of course, speaks to regeneration — the cycle of tree to paper — but for me, it also holds something more intimate: the materiality of memory. Each fragment carries traces of a life, intertwining and meshing with the environment, reminding me that everything is connected, everything in flux.
My relationship to the woods isn’t simple, and I think — or hope — that comes through in my sculptural pieces in The Clearing. When I think of the woods, what comes to mind is not a single image but a series of incidents and emotions.
When I think of woodlands, I don’t just think of the ones I’ve walked through, I think of fictional woodlands, I think of fairytales and folktales: Little Red Riding Hood, the Gunniwolf, Hansel & Gretal, the woods in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, the suicide woods of Dante’s Inferno.
