Individual Residencies
2022 | Fritha Langerman
As many residents before me, I too am interested in the surrounding ancient forests as a starting point of creative production. In a previous series of linocuts that reflected on extinction narratives and representations of natural history, I referred to Uccello and Botticelli’s’ hunting and forest paintings. While forests are the subject of much creative response to environmental challenges, I am concerned with their deep history, and in this spatial context, within western thinking.
I am influenced by Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests (1992) and what he identifies as the symbolic space forests occupy both at the edge of civilization, the place where mythologies are established, as simultaneous places of refuge and places that deny passage. He writes that for the celestial religions of the world to develop, forest had to be felled so that a pathway through the canopy to the heavens could be opened. In addition, the forests became the raw material of conquest and colony, providing for centuries wood for ships and wagons. I am interested in what this opening of tree space means symbolically, and the paradox that clearing and seeming clarity produces collapse and subjugation.
I involved myself in close and slow looking over the period of the residency, looking down and up, but never sideways: at the forest floor, the canopy, the constellations, the humus. I explored compositional devices that crowd, flatten and deny hierarchy or dominance, compressing figure/ground relationships as a reflection on the full and felled forest and the associated tensions between them.