Haunted Forest

In ecoregions rich with woods, the enchanted forest is an archetype present in many of the oldest folklore tales.

A Forest can be symbolic of the unknown, something located just out of sight. 

The Woods can also represent the subconscious mind, a place of interconnected trees might be interwoven thoughts & the many potential pathways become like diverging ideas and converging conclusions.

My artwork is often concerned with calming the mind through grounding into physical nature. 

I am frequently concerned with the intangibility of memory. While it is something that is essential to a sense of personal identity and while I feel like a memory is something which should belong to me- it is often quite difficult to grasp. A memory lost or hazy might feel like the part of the forest which lies just out of sight. I know something is there, I could guess what it is, but haven't the ability to see it clearly.

Having grown up in religious environments as a daydreaming child-- my reality was filled with visages of angels whenever light shown through windows onto hovering dust. I imagined that if I could attune my emotions correctly to focus on empty spaces then I would feel the presence of god. I no longer believe in such things, yet the skill of attunement to energy has lingered with me. 

I am attracted to the word Haunt. Specifically, I am interested in when someone visits a location that was once close to them and say the phrase "ah, My Old Haunt". I believe that lingerings of emotion or memory might be attached to and have presence within physical places. If I visit a place and I am filled with a wave of emotion, I believe that those emotions continue to reside in that space, even without me present. But I wonder often about what happens when the details of memories fade and all that's left is the nondescript emotional responses. 

Artwork from this Haunted Forest series is about when someone gets lost in the woods. 

They cannot see the forest for the trees. They stumble upon a thicket loaded with emotional energy but they cannot pinpoint the source. Often the Haunting is neither positive nor negative. It is confused and cluttered and feels like a vortex. It is not a ghost trying to make contact, it is not an angel or god, it is a reckoning with what is left behind once everything else seems gone. 

"if I cannot remember, where or when, then did it fall at all?"