Ghost Forest - Global Preservation from an Artist’s Perspective

For my second art experience project at Oxford, I chose to see the Ghost Forest exhibition at Oxford’s Natural Science Museum. The Ghost Forest art project is a major art installation of 10 primary rainforest tree stumps which were brought to Europe from a commercially logged forest in Western Africa by artist Angela Palmer. The purpose of Palmer’s work is to call to attention the rapid rate of deforestation in today’s world and the rapid depletion of the world’s natural resources in general. The tree stumps in Palmer’s piece represent the rainforest trees of the world.

This work of art, which took up a substantial amount of space, was both original and effective. It is the first time that I have seen an artist use raw materials from nature, of such an enormous scale, to express her concern for the environment and make a powerful statement about the effects of human consumption on planet Earth’s resources and environment. First, the work maximized its use of space and relative size in an extremely effective, contrasting method. The tree stumps that Palmer chose are enormous in size, and when set on display in front of the museum they are stunning to the audience of this work. The viewers are reminded that these are only the stumps of the trees, only a glimmer of their prior glory and grandeur. This then prompts us to imagine what the rest of the tree looked like before it was cut down for commercial use. The trees are arranged in a circular layout. If we stand in the middle, we can imagine the trees upright, in their full splendor, and gradually, our imagination enables us to feel that we are in the middle of the rainforest in Western Africa. This is the purpose of bringing in several tree stumps and explains why Palmer chose this specific special arrangement when preparing this piece. Finally, a typical Wellingtonia tree, common and prevalent in the United Kingdom, continues to grow in the middle of the exhibition. The purpose of the Wellingtonia is to compare the size of the African trees with the size of a typical tree in the UK. In using this technique to illustrate the relative size of the dead tress to the living one, we realize just how enormous these trees are. To think that there was an entire forest filled with these trees, now gone only for the purpose of human consumption, is a powerful effect of Palmer’s art.

Another jarring observation that rises when viewing this piece is the idea of a living organism forcibly uprooted from its home and its source of life, Earth. The tree stumps that surround this living tree are uprooted from their homes, but the Wellingtonia remains rooted and connected to nature, its source of life. The Wellingtonia contrasts with the tree stumps, which heightens our awareness that these African trees are indeed dead. In the exhibit, we can see the tree’s roots. Once connected to the ground, they are now exposed in the air. The cause of their deaths is right in front of us. This is the purpose of the art – to place the issue of deforestation and natural preservation so close to us that we, the viewers, cannot possibly ignore the effects of the human race on the other living organisms and the environment on the whole. Bringing the tree stumps, from a sparsely populated region of Africa to a bustling, populated city area like Oxford does this very effectively. Overall, I thought that this art project was original, and though ambitious, it is effective and successful in its purpose and its message.