After All

Many millennia after forests began doing it, humans are learning that trees have complex vascular, mycorrhizal, fungal, electrical, and pheromonal ways of networking and relying on one another for species survival. They are communal, familial, and have symbiotic relationships with a diverse range of organisms in the forest floor and with one another. Trees share nutrients, light, threat signals, adaptive responses, and become stronger through community than when thinned or separated. Undamaged forests have collective knowledge and live in interconnected cooperation, not in competition as once we thought, but they instead have evolved to share their needs and resources. Their matter and circuitry existed within their ancestors before they were fully formed, and they continue to feed young saplings and a vast array of organisms through their lives and as they decay.

Humans have learned very little from forests and have learned it so late. But our nature, as often demonstrated by the newly and most alive humans, is a similar embodiment of connection, empathy, resiliency, and hope. The symbiosis now urgently required to sustain our habitat and one another will require an attentiveness to the interdependence and innate potentials of humans, forests, and our entanglement with all species.

These images are reflections on fear, awe, uncertainly, and hope. Figuratively and literally, our hopes for a future rest on the contrast and connectedness of my two subjects, ancient, carbon-capturing forests and young idealists and activists; both are threatened by the impact of consumerism and greed, and both are essential in rescue from catastrophe. These hopeful figments are studies in beauty, fear, and anxiety, and are presented to emphasize our inherent fragility and connectedness.

Images are available in hand-coated palladium prints on cotton paper in 16″x20″ and 20″x24″ sizes, as well as an artist book of 48 8″x10″ palladium prints. Contact gwenwalstrand – at – missouristate.edu regarding exhibitions or purchases.