You should lie down now and remember the forest, for it is disappearing-- no, the truth is it is gone now and so what details you can bring back might have a kind of life. - from The Forest by Susan Stewart Lost Lake is a meditation upon fragility and beauty, discovery and disorientation. The series originated during the pandemic when walking the forest became a refuge from the surreal quality that everyday life had assumed. This series is also influenced by time spent with my young grandchild who is blind. Glimpses of light, and shades of color slip in and out of her perceptual field, but it is the tactile and aural that inform and shape her understanding of the world. Lost Lake reflects my effort to understand her experiences as she walks the forest with me, and as such I have embraced the use of photographic manipulation, double exposure, and applied color fields. The state of the forest is unclear – it may be gone, or partially gone. Trees have fallen, are blurred, or abstracted, sometimes beyond recognition. Frontal depictions of earth, humus, and sediment are evocative of unfolding geologic layers, and the inclusion of hands touching or typing braille, or exploring the forest itself remind us that skin is the portal for tactile knowledge. The abstracted patterns are suggestive of scientific recordings (weather, earthquakes, climate records and hearts), or the textures of tree bark and other patterns of nature. They might also mirror the movement of fingers, touching and exploring (she sees with her hands). Lost Lake is also a lament. The forest bears many scars of anthropogenic disruption, especially the fallen trees, so fragile and vulnerable seeming. There is much to mourn, yet there is also so much to do in this time of precarity. Reflecting this need for action, photographs of hands touching the earth become a poignant reminder that the future of the planet is in our hands. The forest prints are mostly large scale (32 x 40” / 40 x 50”) on rice paper. The photographs of hands are printed life size or smaller. In exhibition I include re-contextualized historic documents drawn from archives (such as the vast holdings at the Perkins School for the Blind). In this work I welcome the off-register color, glitchy lines, multiple exposures. Field recordings include ambient sounds of the forest – both natural (birds chirping, water flowing the human voice) and the mechanical (a train going by) which are mixed to create a sonic collage.