Initial form and detail sketches.
Discovery at a secondhand building material warehouse in Seattle - rounded offcuts from salvaged logs that had been used as underwater pier supports.
Prototyping installation in cardboard at 1:1 scale.
(Left) Discovery at a secondhand building material warehouse in Seattle - rounded offcuts from salvaged logs that had been used as underwater pier supports. (Right) Prototyping installation in cardboard at 1:1 scale.
The installation was self-built in a backyard over the course of two weeks.
The installation "Forest Memory" was accompanied with the following text:
Enter, pause, and reconnect with the core of the forest that was here long ago. We ask our city’s resource stream to drive the design. The outcome is a homecoming. Found leftover cuts from salvaged wooden piers that spent decades underwater re-assemble into a shell of the trunk where they once grew.
The grain remembers the forest. We stand in the forest’s place.
From a forest that wrapped Duwamish villages on the banks of the Ha-AH-Chu before it was Lake Union, passing through the hands of the yard workers at the Western Mill Company when Denny and Yesler were people, not street names, submerged underwater to support a docking pier used by Alaskan trawlers, fished out and remilled… These leftover lumber cuts have lived many lives and are ready to return.
After the festival, FOREST MEMORY found a permanent home as a play structure at the Multicultural Child and Family Hope Center in Tacoma, Washington.