Trafalgar Square, London, U.K.
16-22 November 2009
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.
WATERHOUSE & DODD, 26 CorkStreet, London W1S 3ND
21 May to 12 June 2008
Website: www.modbritart.com
Waterhouse & Dodd presented a series of photographs from 16-22 November in the Cork Street gallery and linked to Angela’s Ghost Forest Art Project.
Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE
20 October – 22 November 2009
Website: www.wellcome.ac.uk
“In April 2007 the artist Angela Palmer embarked on a journey to capture the physical properties of climate change. She travelled to the home of the most polluted air on Earth, Linfen in Shanxi Province, China, and to the place with the purest air and water on Earth, Cape Grim on the northwest tip of Tasmania.
The objects from her journey – including white uniforms worn for one day in both locations now contrasting in colour due to levels of air pollution, face cleansers that reveal dirt from the atmosphere, collected air, coal, abandoned sandals – will be showcased at Wellcome Collection as part of ‘Breathing In’, an installation of Angela Palmer’s work.
Angela Palmer spent a week in Linfen, where she collected water and air samples, recovered abandoned objects and captured local social activity through both film and photography. She then travelled directly to Tasmania, where she repeated her itinerary of evidence gathering. In both locations, Palmer chose to wear the stark white uniforms for the duration of one day, providing the environment with a blank canvas onto which the climate could inscribe itself.
Commenting on her experiences of visiting both locations, Angela Palmer said: “In reaching Linfen, described as the world’s ‘hell on earth’, I found it blackened with generations of coal dust. The smell of rotten eggs in the polluted air was at times overwhelming. But the people seemed happier, friendlier and more at ease with their surroundings than their pampered counterparts in the West. In contrast the Tasmanian reserve was daunting. People were hidden from sight behind net curtains. Picket fences surrounded properties, enclosing perfectly manicured gardens. After a few days, I longed for the sense of community so electrifying and absorbing in the streets of Linfen.”
On her return to the UK, she asked a number of scientists to analyse her findings. Microscopic images of collected air particles are presented alongside the primary evidence. These images make distinct what is invisible to the human eye, enabling the artist to “highlight air as the precious commodity of the future”.
While the objects sit in the display case as extracted scientific data, the accompanying film footage transports the viewer to the sights and sounds of two contrasting landscapes. We are reminded of the parallel lives of people living in such extreme conditions. The silence and stillness of Tasmania contrasts greatly with the bustling activity of Linfen, where pollution from its rapidly expanding coal industry is causing an alarming increase in respiratory and cancer-related illnesses.
Since the creation of ‘Breathing In’, climate change has continued to be a central concern of Palmer’s work. For her latest project, ‘Ghost Forest’, she is transporting ten tropical rainforest tree stumps from a commercially logged forest in western Ghana and placing them in Trafalgar Square (16-22 November 2009), the epicentre of Western industrialisation over the past 200 years. Ghost Forest will travel to Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in December.
James Peto, senior curator at Wellcome Collection comments: “The coincidence of ‘Breathing In’ at Wellcome Collection and the appearance of the artist’s ‘Ghost Forest’ in Trafalgar Square will highlight the extraordinary ingenuity and resourcefulness that Angela Palmer has brought to the challenge of how to engage the wider public with the consequences of climate change.””
The journey of an Egyptian Child Mummy and other portraits
WATERHOUSE & DODD, 26 CorkStreet, London W1S 3ND
21 May to 12 June 2008
Website: www.modbritart.com
Unravelled was largely dedicated to the ‘unravelling’ of an Egyptian mummy loaned by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Exhibited alongside the work inspired by CT scans of The Ashmolean Mummy were a series of self-portraits that use MRI technology.
The mummy, which was the subject of Palmer’s research for the two years prior to the exhibition, was from the collection of Egyptian artefacts in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. The wrapped mummy is an unnamed child who died nearly 2000 years ago.
Instigated by Palmer, the mummy was taken out of the museum in the summer of 2006 and given a full CT body scan at the John Radcliffe Hospital. The scan showed that the child, aged about two, was a boy. From the scans two new sculptures were made in which the boy’s body, free of his bandaging, appeared to float within the 111 glass sheets needed to create each life-size image. Drawn with a black pen, instead of the engraving tool, the repeated lines had an intensity and energy reminiscent of Giacometti’s drawings.
For the exhibition, the actual mummy of the boy was presented in the gallery alongside Palmer’s two sculptural body images. The startling juxtaposition of artistic subject and its representation both disturbed and at the same time deepened engagement with the artist’s project.
Palmer visited and documented the site south west of Cairo where the mummy was discovered in 1888. Whilst there she gathered sand, and filmed and photographed her journey. Exhibited alongside her sculptures were short films and a series of informal photographic portraits of local boys from the village where she stayed. These ‘reunited’ the Ashmolean boy with his homeland, the place he knew during his short life. If the mummy, as a small wrapped body, even at this distance in time had something of the melancholy of a child’s gravestone, Palmer’s films and photographs were brimming with life.
Through Unravelled we learned a little more of the narrative of what happened to a small boy in Egypt during the Roman period. As well as gender and revealing the shape of the body and skeleton, the scan revealed the detail of the elaborate bandaging of the body and use of gold studs. Each piece of information contributed to a more detailed picture of another era. But as art the exhibition offered even more as it merged past and present, engaged with science and other disciplines while always considering the aesthetic impact of each work and display.
Times Square, Scotswood Rd, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4EP
June 2007
Angela’s work was exhibited at the Centre for Life, Newcastle during May and June 2007.
Royal College of Art Final Show
Kensington Gardens , London
15 to 29 June 2007
Angela’s work for the Royal College of Art Final Show was based on climate change and highlighted air as the precious commodity of the future. In April 2007, Angela travelled 500 miles south west of Beijing to Linfen in Shanxi Province – said to be the most polluted place on earth. She then went directly to Cape Grim in the North West tip of Tasmania, which claims to have the purest air and water in the world. Her exhibition featured a variety of media generated from these locations – film, photography, found objects as well as glass flasks containing air from both places, and jars with river and puddle samples which have now been analysed by scientists in the UK. Two identical white outfits she wore in both locations were on show alongside vials containing the water she extracted after shampooing her hair.
Inside Out: Body Imaging Sculptures by Angela Palmer
Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum. The Royal College of Surgeons, 35-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2
30 January – 20 May 2007
Website: http://www.rcseng.ac.uk
The increasing cross-over between science and art has seen an explosion of work in a myriad of media worldwide, resulting in exciting collaborations between the disciplines. Angela’s work is largely based on details derived from MRI and CAT scans which she engraves or draws onto multiple sheets of glass, layer upon layer. This technique allows her to use the scientific anatomy of the human body stripped of its recognisable features.
Most of Angela’s work is based on MRI scans of herself – 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.
http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/exhibitions/archive/inside-out-body-imaging-sculptures-by-angela-palmer/?searchterm=palmer
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
15th March – 16th April 2006
Website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk
Young British artists bring us new ways of seeing heads, inside and out. Angela Palmer and Katharine Dowson have undertaken Magnetic Resonance scanning to see into their own brains and bodies, and have transformed their personal experiences into glass sculptures, embossed images, etchings, drawings, and film – self portraits that represent the universality of human anatomy.
Topologies of the Mind: Angela Palmer and Mark Lythgoe
The Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street, London W1S 2JT
29 November – 19 December 2003
Website: http://www.mlythgoe.com/ApalmerMlythgoe.htm
Angela Palmer, in an unusual collaboration between art and science with neurophysiologist Dr Mark Lythgoe, presented eerie glass representations of the contents of the presenter Carol Vordeman’s head.
