Exhibition about the forest

Woodlands

The conversation about forests has many voices. Economists, researchers, forest owners and biologists provide us with words and numbers. But it is the rustle of the foliage, the song of the birds, the rippling of the water that give us the feelings.

How can we best understand what a forest really is? What is its value? How can we relate to the forest? Within ecopsychology there is a world view where everything in nature is alive and affects each other, and where humans have a cosmic responsibility. At the same time, science demonstrates these interconnections through a variety of scientific methods, through biology, geometry and music.

Is the human still the relevant frame of reference? The current environmental crisis underscores the importance of moving beyond the anthropocentric frame of reference and understanding that we are not the ultimate object of the planet. With ongoing climate change and depletion of biological diversity, it is important that the conversation about the forest can be conducted in several different ways and with a diversity of expressions.

Seven artists’ investigation

The exhibition shows seven artists’ investigation of their relationship to the forest and takes us on a journey to understand some of these thoughts and expressions in jewellery art, visual art and installations.

Visual artist Iris Alexandrov shows photography, film, installations and sound works that describe connectivity, diversity and connection. Her investigation consists of encountering the forest in a symbolic image world that moves between light and dark, between materiality and experience. Here we encounter the forest as a living community that communicates through chemical signals in the flow of sound, light and nutrients connected in a network of life.

Jewelry artists Sofia Bankeström, Åsa Elmstam, Petronella Eriksson, Catarina Hällzon, Therese Johansson and Lena Lindahl show jewelry and corpus that tell about more than one function. They are works that invite use and interaction, to an external and internal dialogue where the big is contained in the small. The materials and techniques are many. But regardless of whether the works are made of wood, fish skin, elk tooth or silver, they are shaped based on the artists’ lived experience of the complex interplay we call forest and its teeming rich language.