Ghost Forest...
All images - Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Artist Maya Lin has planted 49 towering almost dead cedar trees in the middle of New York City.
The installation, called ‘Ghost Forest’ features 49 Atlantic white cedar trees from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. There, some 100 miles south of Manhattan, large swaths of decades’ old costal forests are being lost to salt water inundation. Each tree is over forty feet tall.
The work is situated at Madison Square Park which is located on Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of The Lenape (Delaware) people and is a stark warning about the dangers of climate change, Ghost Forest takes its name from the phenomena of the same name. Around the world, trees are dying because of insect infestations and rising sea levels, which can leave trees drowning in saltwater.
“I call them my gentle giants,” Lin said at the opening of the exhibition, the trees having been carefully planted amid a tangle of electric utility cables and sprinkler lines buried beneath the park’s lawn. “I wanted you to feel like you’re wandering through something intimate.” The entire work which carries a sense of mourning, has taken on added meaning since the death of her husband in January.
The Atlantic white cedar populations on the East Coast are endangered by past logging practices and threats from climate change, including extreme weather events that yield salt water intrusion, wind events, and fire. The trees in Ghost Forest were all slated to be cleared as part of regeneration efforts in the fragile ecosystem of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
If you have the time, make yourself a cup of tea and watch this documentary about the work.
It’s wonderful.
If this doesn’t make you want to walk more gently on the earth, I don’t know what would…
Queen Marie
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