Black Forest Project
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Black Forest Project is a collaborative group comprising Lisa Siders, Denise Burge, Tracy Featherstone, and Jenny Ustick. The exhibition “Do You Know the Shape
of Desire?” combines photography, drawings, sculpture, and video projects made
in the forests of Germany and the Midwestern states USA. As individuals, each of us in
Black Forest Project has drawn from our heritage and landscape, from German
roots, to the Rocky and Appalachian mountains. Together, we have used this to develop projects based
on personal fantasy about the forest, and enlisted one another’s assistance in
carrying them out. We worked
in pine forests in Germany and in old-growth forests in Ohio and Michigan,
exploiting the specific ecology of both regions.
The forest is an iconic element of landscape; psychologically, it represents isolation, melancholy, inwardness, and transformation. In myth and folklore, the forest can be seen as the paramount cinematic space. When one enters its ‘black box’, time is suspended, looped, and reversed, characters often become lost and change identity, events and figures repeat endlessly. The Black Forest is a locus of the German fairy tale, but exists today in a state far removed from the old forest depicted in those stories. Now it is an ‘artificial’ monoculture forest of mostly planted pine, after suffering from deforestation for centuries; for us, this only adds to its aura as a place of theater. We are navigating the boundary between the psychic implications of primeval and engineered landscape, between ancient and contemporary ideas about the forest. Both old-growth and row-planted pine forest in our Midwestern hometowns oddly resemble the pine-dominated forests in Germany and produce a similar atmosphere of hypnotic repetition.
Our interest is mostly concerned with the feelings provoked by the forest. We project emotionally onto the natural world our feelings about what wilderness represents: wildness, innocence, mystery, etc. Spaces that we have damaged hold special intensity, and are powerful spaces for fantasy. Historic and folkloric connections between Germany and the Midwest lay fertile ground for discovery and play. The hotel room became the staging area for replaying our outdoor adventures. We ventured out to soak up the forest minerals with our feet and absorb the unpredictability of the force surrounding us. Once fully intoxicated with our surroundings, we brought roots, leaves, and bark inside to tame into our personal vision. As our interior space became slave to the external forces of the forest, we carved soap, made drawings, re-cycled and projected imagery of our activities, and mapped our fantasies onto the room. In this work we are looking at and identifying with ‘nature’ through a lens that both distances us from it and places us intimately within it. By creating idealized interior landscapes, our goal is to make work about the psychological space of the forest, how we think and feel about it as an archetype of the natural world.
The forest is an iconic element of landscape; psychologically, it represents isolation, melancholy, inwardness, and transformation. In myth and folklore, the forest can be seen as the paramount cinematic space. When one enters its ‘black box’, time is suspended, looped, and reversed, characters often become lost and change identity, events and figures repeat endlessly. The Black Forest is a locus of the German fairy tale, but exists today in a state far removed from the old forest depicted in those stories. Now it is an ‘artificial’ monoculture forest of mostly planted pine, after suffering from deforestation for centuries; for us, this only adds to its aura as a place of theater. We are navigating the boundary between the psychic implications of primeval and engineered landscape, between ancient and contemporary ideas about the forest. Both old-growth and row-planted pine forest in our Midwestern hometowns oddly resemble the pine-dominated forests in Germany and produce a similar atmosphere of hypnotic repetition.
Our interest is mostly concerned with the feelings provoked by the forest. We project emotionally onto the natural world our feelings about what wilderness represents: wildness, innocence, mystery, etc. Spaces that we have damaged hold special intensity, and are powerful spaces for fantasy. Historic and folkloric connections between Germany and the Midwest lay fertile ground for discovery and play. The hotel room became the staging area for replaying our outdoor adventures. We ventured out to soak up the forest minerals with our feet and absorb the unpredictability of the force surrounding us. Once fully intoxicated with our surroundings, we brought roots, leaves, and bark inside to tame into our personal vision. As our interior space became slave to the external forces of the forest, we carved soap, made drawings, re-cycled and projected imagery of our activities, and mapped our fantasies onto the room. In this work we are looking at and identifying with ‘nature’ through a lens that both distances us from it and places us intimately within it. By creating idealized interior landscapes, our goal is to make work about the psychological space of the forest, how we think and feel about it as an archetype of the natural world.