Capturing and transforming the changing forms found in nature is the basis for The Forest Project, which documents 60-acres of urban forest through multiple mediums and numerous collaborations. This community-based, interdisciplinary investigation memorializes one piece of land and its passage from wild woodland farm to manicured residential development. 

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In the Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry asserts that the worst thing you can do to the soil is render it infertile.  The Forest Project chronicles that process over an eight year period as the land is clear-cut, stripped of its topsoil, excavated, eroded, resurfaced and planted with non-native invasive plant species and monoculture grasses.

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Using the contents of the forest and material salvaged from the now demolished 1865 farmhouse, the land’s history is acknowledged and the intersection of colonialism, capitalism and consumerism with environmental destruction is illuminated. 

 

Utilizing the rituals of remembering and grieving, usually assigned to our dearly departed human kin, the viewer is invited to mourn the destruction of nature with the commemoration of deforestation and soil degradation.   

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