Collecting Forests

Images from Collecting Forests

2020 - 2022

Collecting Forests is a series of large-scale digital collages exploring the construction, idealization, and loss of our environments through images of the forest. Responding to our current era where the entirety of our world is affected by humans, Merrill considers how our ideas, values, curiosity, fears, destruction, and expectations are projected into our increasingly endangered forests. 

Merrill's images are neither real nor absolute fiction; they point to a complicated relationship to the environment, a combination of what exists and what is desired. The images, poetically situated between reality and simulation, depict forests as dioramas, theatre sets, and wallpaper. These images become a metaphor for forest loss and the faint replicas that remain of these landscapes. The images Merrill creates are views from within a forest, presenting specific but not landmark locations, contrary to a distant, expansive, and authoritative view of the landscape.

Each picture is created by digitally collaging hundreds of individual photographs made in forests across the United States. The collection of plants and trees in each image is improbable – a form of digital assisted migration – signaling possibility, connection, and loss.

Forest Backdrop, dimensions variable, 4k looping video, 2min loop, 2022

Work from Collecting Forests written about in the Dallas Morning News, Artists Leigh Merrill Explores Delicate Balance Between Humans and Forests, by Danielle Avram.

© 2023 Leigh Merrill, All Rights Reserved