Ghost Forest: A Year in Oxford

Installation of Rainforest Trees from the Tropics

The lawn of Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, July 8, 2010 – July 2011

www.ghostforest.org

Artist’s Statement

Ghost Forest is an installation consisting of 10 primary rainforest tree stumps which I brought over from a commercially logged primary rainforest in Ghana, Western Africa. They are currently exhibited on the lawn of Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum in central Oxford and will be shown there until July 31, 2011. The work is intended to highlight the alarming depletion of the world’s natural resources, and in particularly the continued rate of deforestation.  (See www.ghostforest.org)  I conceived the project after I began researching issues on climate change while studying at the Royal College of Art. Andrew Mitchell, a scientist specialising in rainforests, told me that a tropical forest the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds. At the same time, Sir David King, the government’s then Chief Scientific Officer, declared that climate change posed a greater threat to mankind than terrorism. I then embarked on what turned into a massive logistical task – to bring  a series of rainforest tree stumps to Europe and present them as a ‘ghost forest’ – using the negative space created by the missing trunks as a metaphor for climate change, the absence representing the removal of the world’s ‘lungs’ through continued deforestation.

I made several field trips last year to a commercially logged primary rainforest in Ghana where we sourced a group of 10 tree stumps. The Ghost Forest installation was exhibited in Trafalgar Square in London last November, courtesy of the GLA. It then moved to Copenhagen in December to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference, and was situated in Thorvaldsens Plads, a magnificent city centre square next to Parliament Square and the National Museum. More than 12,000 delegates from 193 nations attended the Conference where the future of rainforests was a key component of the agenda. The trees are currently on show for a year in the historic location of the Museum of Natural History and Pitt Rivers in Oxford, straddling the UN International Year of Biodiversity and the UN International Year of Forests next year. It is also the 150th anniversary year of the Museum of Natural History.

All locations  provide a powerful stage: Trafalgar Square is one of the world’s most visited tourist sites and the epicentre of Western industrialisation over the past 200 years. Nelson’s Column stands over 50 metres (169 feet) tall, the approximate height many of these trees would have stood. In Copenhagen, Ghost Forest stood outside the Danish Parliament building as a symbol of threatened rainforest trees throughout the world, as the future of the rainforest was being debated by world leaders only a few kilometres away. In Oxford, it is 150 years since the ‘Great Debate’ took place in the Museum of Natural History between Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, and the then Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, over the theory of evolution. Today the museum houses over 5.7 million speciments which are used by scientists worldwide providing evidence on subjects of particular relevance today, such as climate change, the effects of deforestation, biodiversity loss, evolution and extinction.

Seven indigenous species are represented in the Ghost Forest installation – Denya, Dahuma, Danta, Hyedua, Mahogany,Wawa and three varieties of Celtis – all with a rich and varied ecology and all with equally diverse uses by man. It is important to explain the source of these particular trees, Ghana. The tropical rainforests of the Congo Basin are the closest to Europe, just 3,000 miles due south from Trafalgar Square along the
Greenwich Meridian. Having lost 90% of its primary rainforest over the past 50 years, Ghana now exercises strict regulations in sustainable and responsible forestry. Last year it became the first country in Africa to enter the VPA (Voluntary Partnership Agreement) with the European Union in an effort to outlaw illegal logging. Its remaining concessions are all selectively logged, which means the retention, crucially, of the forest canopy; the natural regeneration of the forest; and a viable and sustainable timber industry for the local workforce: the installation therefore carries a message of hope and optimism.

The Ghost Forest tree stumps – most of which fell naturally in adverse weather conditions – come from the Suhuma forest reserve in Western Ghana, a selectively logged concession run by John Bitar and Co, one of the largest timber producers in Ghana. They operate under license from the Ghana Forestry Commission and run a Chain of Custody tracking system. Ghassan Bitar, who runs the company, has been enormously helpful in realising the Ghost Forest project. Together with his nephew Sebastian Houweling, they are keen to promote sustainable forestry and work in collaboration with WWF, Ghana’s Wildlife Wood Project, the EU, and the Zoological Society of London on various conservation and community programmes. Ghassan Bitar has spoken on issues relating to illegal logging at Chatham House in London and was instrumental in designing the agreement for Ghana’s VPA with the EU. This year he began one of the world’s largest private reforestation programmes, which involves planting 25 million trees on degraded land over the next five years. The VPA agreement follows several years of attempts by Ghana to halt deforestation: in 1994 Ghana banned the export of raw logs, encouraged reforestation in degraded areas and put 15 per cent of land under protection.

Zafer Adra, the forest manager and Ntim Gyakari, a botanist and former curator of the Herbarium in Kumasi, Ghana, have played a key role in helping me identify the tree stumps and overseeing their removal from the forest. Ntim co-wrote a book on Ghana’s rainforest trees with Dr William Hawthorne, a botanist at Oxford University. The University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science has assisted throughout the project, and with the presentation of the trees in Trafalgar Square and Copenhagen.

Like all art, Ghost Forest can be appreciated or interpreted in many ways and on many levels – no response is right or wrong. Many observers will see the stumps as beautiful sculptural objects; others will perhaps see the installation as a scene of devastation – perhaps evoking Paul Nash’s rendering of the stark landscape of the First World War where only the splintered tree stumps remain in the devastated land. Others may see the tree stumps posited in the no-man’s land between the past and the future – the past representing the life and growth of these trees, their potential, and what they provided biologically for the planet; while the future may signal, for some, an imperilled world, as the consequences of deforestation continues apace – another ‘New World’. For others the installation may represent an overt piece of political activism – a call to arms. I am equally comfortable with all responses. Many thinkers maintain that all art is political; politics touches all aspects of our lives. Life is about politics. And art is about communication, often transmitting unpalatable truths. As one artist commented: ‘I don’t think artists can avoid being political. Artists are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. When we stop singing, it’s a sure sign of repressive times ahead.’

In Trafalgar Square and Copenhagen the installation had the  support of Deutsche Bank, the main sponsor; Arts Council England; the Global Canopy Programme; Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests; and several other charities and companies. In addition many passionate individuals have given very generously, both financially and with their time. We are now actively seeking new sponsors and supporters to help raise the necessary funds for the installation’s year in Oxford. If you would like to contribute please visit the ‘Donate’ site on the dedicated website, www.ghostforest.org or contact me directly at angelaspalmer@gmail.com. The Ghost Forest Art Project is a registered not-for-profit company and every penny is accounted for.

My interest in Climate Change began two years ago when I had a dream that I went to the most polluted place in the world wearing a floating white outfit. I then went to the cleanest place on earth wearing an identical white outfit, and exhibited both in a stark white gallery. When I woke I resolved to do just that. I spent a week in the most polluted place on earth, Linfen in Shanxi province in China, a city in the heart of China’s coal mining region, which according to official surveys has the world’s most polluted air and water. I then visited the cleanest – Cape Grim in the North West tip of Tasmania, which benefits from the cleansing blast of the winds of the Roaring Forties. In both places I wore an identical white outfit, and brought back film, photographs, water and air samples, all of which I juxtaposed for my final show at the Royal College of Art in London. The work will be exhibited next month at the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road in London. Entitled ‘Breathing In’, the show opens on October 20.

Many people have commented that at the core of my work is a desire to ‘map’; the work is almost always accompanied with a narrative, often the result of months of research involving many specialists. In a way it is old fashioned story-telling, perhaps largely informed by my background in journalism. A common theme running through all my projects is the collision between art and science, and almost without exception the work is the result of collaborations with scientists in every conceivable discipline, from engineers specialising in bio-fluidics, to dust-mite and spider experts, radiologists, veterinary scientists, paediatric dentists and specialists in ancient Egyptian dyes.

Before becoming involved in the world of climate change, I had been making work based on details derived from MRI and CAT scans which I engrave or draw onto multiple sheets of glass, layer upon layer. This technique allows me to use the scientific anatomy of the human body stripped of its recognisable features. Most of my work is based on MRI scans of myself – rebuilding the body, slice by slice, to create a self-portrait. While the works may not be instantly recognisable as a portrait, they are objective representations – removing the familiar to expose the extraordinary architecture of the internal human form.

The inspiration for this work came from an exhibit in Oxford’s History of Science Museum, constructed by the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin in the mid 1940s. She drew the electron density contour images of the penicillin molecule on horizontal sheets of Perspex. I adapted this method by drawing details of the scanned human form on multiple sheets of glass, presented in three dimensions on a vertical plane.

A recent project involved a child mummy in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The wrapped mummy is an unnamed child who died nearly 2,000 years ago. The Ashmolean Museum agreed to take the child to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where it underwent over 2,500 CT scans, performed by one of the world’s leading radiologists, Dr Stephen Golding assisted by his colleague Dr Chris Alvey. The doctors, who revealed the child to be a boy, prepared a detailed medical report which showed the boy probably died of pneumonia and had dysplasia of the hip, suggesting he almost certainly had a limp. Using details from the scans drawn on 111 sheets of glass, I was able to recreate the child three-dimensionally without disturbing his bandages. Scans of his teeth were also analysed by Oxford orthodontist Lars Christensen, who established the child was around two years old. This was confirmed by Dr Mary Lewis, a bio-archaeologist at the University of Reading. Dr Christensen also discovered the child was ‘rather special’ as he was missing his two front side teeth – an occurrence in only 0.4per cent of children born today.

In addition to creating sculptures of the child, I visited and documented the burial site in the Faiyum in Egypt where the child was removed in the winter of 1888 by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, before being presented to the Ashmolean Museum. My exhibition at Waterhouse and Dodd last year featured a film of the child’s homeland, the place he knew during his short life. There were also informal photographs of local boys – the mummy’s ‘brothers’ some 2,000 years on. In addition I brought back sand from his burial site to ‘reunite’ the boy with his home.

A previous project involved raising awareness about asthma and this led me into the world of dust mites. On this, I collaborated with Professor Tadj Oreszczyn and Dr Marcella Ucci at University College London; Dr Barbara Hart, a world authority on dust mites; and Professor Fritz Vollrath, a zoologist at Oxford University. The resulting installation won the Polly Campbell Award at London’s Jerwood Space.