What realities can we imagine, especially in places absent of human life? What lives can we create within the shaded glades, sun-speckled meadows and rolling mounds of a common pine forest?

As a child, I wandered through forests while imagining countless creatures hiding just beyond sight, living full and rich lives that I could only yearn to discover. As an adult, forests have retained some of this magic, which seems all the more important today as we grow increasingly distant from these places. I have also become fascinated with the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about the forest. All to try make sense of these places and to find a sense of wonder. Wonder itself is an experience and feeling that seems increasingly difficult to have. And yet, as I wander old paths in familiar settings now marked on maps, I ask: What is to be encountered or experienced? What lives just behind the bend or just beyond the path’s edge? 

trollskogen, which translates to ‘the troll forest’ in English, uses secondhand frames, polymer clay and photographic images treated with heavy body acrylic varnish to create a photographic storybook that explores how people perceive forests as extraordinary and ordinary spaces and sites. The installation explores the boundaries between fact and fiction and between perception and experience.