Et skovbad / A Forest Bath

For a year, I was the artist-in-residence at DYREHAVEHUSET, property of Bess Kristoffersen, which is a studio located in a forest about 70 kilometers outside of Copenhagen.

During the residence – as I worked surrounded by blooming trees and sprouting vegetation – every day felt like bathing in chlorophyll, as I watched the forest change its colors as the seasons passed. The works you see in this project “A FOREST BATH” were made during my year in the forest.

NATURE / CULTURE PRINTS
A series of prints made on tree stumps that are more than one hundred year old. The trees were mainly beech and the prints reflects both their annual rings and the scars left by the saws that cut them down. Using ink and acrylic color, the prints were made directly on the tree stumps on handmade Japanese kozo paper that I had dyed with juice from locally sourced pinecones, cherry branches and beech leaves.

SENSE OF THE FOREST
For years, I have been collecting pieces of used, weather beaten sailcloth. While working in the forest, I started to see a connection between the patinated sails and how the changing seasons transforms nature. The weather beaten sailcloth have been hand dyed and hand printed with acrylic colors to resemble the structures and sufaces of the forest, like the new sprouts in the spring, the autumn leaves and the sense of the first frost in the air.

WOOD WIDE WEB
Inspired by Peter Wohlleben’s book “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate” I created a fiber installation made of hundreds of locally sourced and hand painted linden wood branches. I wanted to show how trees are interconnected through what Wohlleben calls a “wood wide web” and can communicate about sharing water and nutrients.