State of the Forest Installation

Photo of Suze Woolf installation

"State of the Forest" Installation Photograph, Environmental Impact II, Produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C. (Photo Courtesy of The James Museum, St. Petersburg, FL)

 Photo of Suze Woolf installation    Photo of Suze Woolf painting on fabric
 Ten trees from "State of the Forest" Installation, details of layers. (Photographs by Jonathan T. Bishop.)
 
Installation Details
Original paintings digitally printed on fabric, ceiling suspended
Up to 30 sets of 3 layers: printed transparent silk organza, printed microfiber polyester, and plain black or black with with white text
Up to 1000 square feet
 
For the traveling exhibit Environmental Impact II, I created a large installation, State of the Forest.  Thirty of my burned tree paintings were digitally transferred to fabric in three layers: a printed transparent silk organza, a printed solid layer and a plain black layer. The fabric is shaped to fit the contour of the trees and suspended in sets from the ceiling. Many have stories written by wildland firefighter and author, Lorena Williams printed on the black layer.

 

The original paintings are from burned trees all over western North America from many different forest fires. In this way they represent all fires. Many are shown in the Burnscape section of this site. By using fabric to represent this grove, I convey that the forests we take as permanent are in fact fragile. A number of the individual paintings are shown the Burnscape section.

 

In 2018 ten were installed in a downtown Seattle storefront thanks to Shunpike's Storefronts initiative.

Photo of Suze Woolf installation
(Champ Emsinger photo)

In 2017, twelve original paintings were installed at the  San Juan Islands Museum of Art, mounted on board and suspended from the ceiling. It was an artistic peak moment.

They were also installed at the Museum of Northwest Art's 2016 Surge Festival and a blog post describes the complex process of production and installation.

 

Many thanks to Arisa Brown and First2Print/DesignWorks International, New York for all their assistance in assembly and printing.

As the climate warms, forest fires are becoming more frequent and catastrophic in the western United States. My deep anxiety with the impacts of climate change on wilderness are emerging in this series. Burned-over areas of forest are riveting. Unfamiliar tree forms are newly exposed. Formerly hidden terrain features become visible. Normal greens, blues and browns are transformed. All the worst fires of the last fifty years have occured in the last five years.

Please contact me if you are interested in learning more about any of my images. All represent original paintings, not reproductions. I have many more paintings than are shown on this site. And, since I frequently work in series, there may be additional views of the subjects shown here.