In a Time of Change: The Art of Fire

Today I was invited to traipse around the territory of an "experimental forest", or Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, called Bonanza Creek, just outside of Fairbanks.  Along with a few of my fellow artists, others who had been chosen for this artist residency: In a Time of Change: The Art of Fire ( see artist's call here), I spent a happy sunny day learning about the myriad of ecological factors- wildland fire being just one of them- that have an impact on the precious boreal forest and its five tree species: birch, aspen, balsam poplar, white spruce, and black spruce.  I was particularly interested in the 'carcasses' (i.e. remaining fallen dead trees) of birch, and the way the birch skins seemed to wrinkle up and separate from the core of the tree (which rotted), but [the skin] remained intact:

It did seem carcass-like, corpse-ian even, like elephant legs left from a massacre.

But while I was photographing these carcasses strewn about the forest, I began to notice that growing on  them were tiny little micro-cosmic landscapes:  mushrooms and cladonia were like "trees" in this world in miniature, and variants of green mosses were like the tundra tussocks or grasslands.









 
Sometimes old carcass bark even served as a mountain range in my mini landscapes:

I did my best to focus my attention, every moment be engaged, and let my brain act as a sponge absorbing all of the science jargon so far from my vocabulary and vernacular, to feel connected to the forest and its components both momentous and minute, and gather fodder over which to stew, to create this body of work for show a year from now (Aug 2012) regarding wildfire, ecology, the boreal forest and climate change.