Duration 40′ –
Forest began as a purely visual response to the landscape and the cyclical shifts of the natural world. Having made several earlier works in this environment, the project grew from a fascination with the capacity of digital film technology to capture colour, clarity, and atmosphere with a fidelity remarkably close to direct human perception. Over the course of four years, it evolved quietly in the background. Whenever sunlight broke through, snow transformed the ground, or heavy rain swept across the trees and moorland, it became a cue to return to familiar vantage points, often at a moment’s notice. These spontaneous encounters with weather and light shaped the work’s visual language.
As the material accumulated, a deeper attunement to the energetic character of each season developed, gradually informing the cinematography. Distinct shifts in the land—moments when the earth becomes alive with new growth and possibility, or when autumn leaves burnish into rich golden yellows and browns—suggested different approaches to filming. The low sun of autumn, filtering through dense foliage, lent itself to crane shots whose slow sweeping motion echoed the season’s atmosphere. Early summer, by contrast, brought a period when leaves deepened into dense green and streams regained their flow, becoming highly reflective surfaces; this was conveyed through slow focus pulls that drew attention to the shifting play of light. Every frame of the project was shot as a one-person crew, carrying lightweight cameras and supports across uneven terrain from the nearest parking spots, an approach that shaped the imagery’s immediacy and responsiveness.
Throughout this process, paying attention to the smallest movements—the trembling of dried bracken in a breeze or the gentle sag of a snow-laden branch—deepened the relationship with the land itself. Repeated visits revealed gestures, rhythms, and transformations that only become visible through prolonged familiarity and patient observation.
During editing, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons served as a structural foundation, with each month loosely corresponding to the three movements in each concerto. This created a natural synchrony between the pulse of the music, the rhythm of the imagery, and the pacing of the cuts. The film ultimately took shape as a single 40-minute 16:9 HD work featuring a contemporary re-composition by Natalia Kulabuchova, who wove elements of the original score into new forms—sometimes recognisable and sometimes transformed through sampling and retexturing. The edit was first constructed to a traditional recording of the Four Seasons used as a temporary track, and there was a particular moment of magic each time the images and music aligned in unexpected ways. As the project evolved during its tour, it became a multiscreen installation, prompting a triptych version that reimagined the material’s spatiality for a more immersive experience – link to this gallery-based version is here.
Forest also traces a line back to earlier work. Two decades before this project began, a short film made in 1992 in the same landscape—also titled “Forest“—explored the terrain in a more impressionistic, phenomenological way. The current film extends that early inquiry into a sustained meditation on time, transformation, and the intimate exchanges between observer and environment.