Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, Denmark
7-18 December 2009

Website: www.ghostforest.org

Ghost Forest was an original and ambitious art project by Angela Palmer that sought to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change.

The art installation involved taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana. The tree stumps were presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London on 16-22 November 2009, and then in Copenhagen on 7-18 December 2009 to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference.

Inspiration

The connection between deforestation and climate change, and the challenge to express that visually, is the basis for Angela’s most ambitious and logistically challenging work yet. The concept is to present a series of rainforest tree stumps 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.

Its location in Trafalgar Square is key:  it is one of the world’s most visited tourist sites and the epicentre of Western industrialisation over the past 200 years.  For the majority of visitors, the scale, beauty and diversity of the stumps will be unlike anything they have experienced before.  Nelson’s Column stands over 50 metres (169 feet) tall, the approximate height many of these trees would have stood at in the wild.

It was impossible not to explore in the imagination what a space like Trafalgar Square would look like if populated by such massive examples of nature’s work alongside man’s, and to ponder the consequences of destruction on such a scale as the missing stumps represent.

Making It Happen

In the months leading up to the installation, Angela made several field trips to a commercially logged primary rainforest in Ghana where a group of 10 tree stumps were identified. These were shipped to England, and the Ghost Forest was presented first in Trafalgar Square in London in November, with permission from the Greater London Authority.

Ghost Forest was then shipped directly to Copenhagen where it was exhibited in Thorvaldsens Plads, a magnificent city centre square next to Parliament Square and the National Museum from December 7-16.  The timing was designed to coincide with the UN Conference on Climate Change, where the future of rainforests led the agenda and with over 12,000 delegates from 193 countries.

None of this would have been possible without the help and support of many people in many organisations.  Angela is immensely grateful to all of them for making this project come to life.

Offsetting

After review by ClimateCare, Ghost Forest’s carbon footprint will be offset by supporting an initiative to introduce efficient cook stoves – Gyapas – in Ghana.  Most families in Ghanaian towns and cities cook with charcoal using a metal grate or ‘coal-pot’ that burns very inefficiently and uses a lot of fuel wood. Given the consequences this has for deforestation, The Ghana Stoves project is a very apt one for Ghost Forest to support.  An insulated, efficient cookstove, the Gyapa cooks food more quickly, requires less fuel and is less smoky.  They are also, therefore, cheaper for Ghanaian families to run and healthier, and since the stoves are manufactured locally, they help provide employment.

The Ashanti Stool

During research for Ghost Forest, artist Angela Palmer found, through an extraordinary coincidence, an Ashanti stool belonging to the tribe’s famous warrior queen. It came up by chance in her local auction house. It transpires the stool has a deep, spiritual meaning to the Ashanti, whose homeland is where the artist sourced the trees for the Ghost Forest project. The stool is also made, of course, from the timber of a rainforest tree.