A Slow Foreigning
Foreign - from Latin foris ‘outside’ (see forest)
Forest - from Latin foris ‘outside’ (see foreign)
This ongoing body of work began as a documentation of a changing landscape. More often I have been returning to beloved natural spaces to find them unrecognizable after wild fires. I began taking impressions of burned trees in the spirit of pre-photography death masks, as a way to honor both the loss and resilience of trees, and to bear witness to a rapidly changing environment. Simultaneously, there is a reckoning with the changing geography of my own body, as well as a cultural landscape shifting away from inhabiting both the body and natural spaces. I find myself looking to nature for examples of resilience and adaptation in a slowly foreigning landscape.
