This is Sandy Brown Jensen, and you’re listening to Viz City, KLCC’s arts review program. Imagine that we have built a campfire starting with newspaper. As it flares up, you place an entire open sheet of newspaper on the hottest coals. Instantly, it turns into a vanishingly thin, translucent pane of ash floating up into the night sky.
Artist/photographer Sarah Grew reminds us that floating sheet of carbon held the last memory of that forest.
Grew’s innovative installation at Lane Community College called “Ghost Forest” seeks to capture those ephemeral memories of the burning forest.
After the wildfire season of 2020 had cooled down, Sarah went to the various fire sites and collected ash. As she wandered through the ruined forest, she felt that she wanted to contribute to the conversation about climate change through her art. “Carbon,” she thought, “is the basic building block of life. Carbon is what remains after a fire, so carbon must be the material I will use in my art to express my anguish about the devastation.”
So Sarah set about teaching herself how to carbon print. Her formula includes ground up forest ash, gelatin and honey. She says the different tree ash accounts for different colors of her prints; for example, the warm sepia tones are Doug fir.
The carbon tissues are mated under water onto glass–what are called lantern slides.
The translucent photographs are like unfurled pieces of ash-pictures floating up from the fire.
These sheets of glass are suspended from the ceiling from seventy cables–each one representing 1000 wildfires of the 70,000 fires that burned in the US every year for the last decade.
The installation is mounted in the Roger Hall Gallery, Building 11 out at Lane Community College. Sometimes you just gotta get in your transportation device of choice and go out and see something this magical with your own eyes.
This is Sandy Brown Jensen for KLCC.