Sylvan Essence: In the Language of the Forest

Sylvan Essence is an interactive installation exploring the visual, auditory, and olfactory language of the Hoh Rainforest, a temperate rainforest situated on the ancestral lands of the Hoh and Quileute Tribes. Using image, sound, and scent from the Hoh, Sylvan Essence employs photography, sculpture, sound, and olfactory elements, allowing the viewer to see, hear, and smell the entangled web of relationships and complex conversations that make up the arboreal universe. Drawing from scientific research on plant communication, plant sensing, and tree bioacoustics, this piece coaxes the imagination to think and breathe in attunement with the trees. In this space, the viewer sees images of the forest, smells the fragrance of the moss and the trees, and they hear the sounds of the Hoh. They can walk around and move inside a tree-like photo-sculpture, a moss-covered tree trunk on the outside, root structures and the smell of earth on the inside. Situated here, the viewer can look up at the tree canopy and find a place to rest on a mycelial stool. The mycelia are the “internet” of the forest, a complex fungal network beneath the ground enabling both communication and resource-sharing between trees. While sitting, the viewer can “connect with the connectors.” Here they can be still and listen to the resonant, deep, rumble of the tree roots, a unique underground language recorded from a giant mother tree. As a human being ensconced in this reconstructed forest cosmos, the viewer has the opportunity to “become-with” a multi-species ecosystem that is non-hierarchical, nurturing, and healing. Here they can contemplate the present moment, but they can also use that moment to re-envision different possible futures using the beauty and logic of the forest.

            From a post-anthropocentric viewpoint, the objectification of the non-human, including the plant world, has directly contributed to species devaluation, extraction, and extinction. This dynamic is also tied to intra-human exploitation, as dehumanization of people of color and environmental destruction are interrelated. As a maker, I use this as an opportunity to reimagine more synergistic systems, proposing a world where multi-species intersectionalism is possible.