Angela Palmer's Ghost Forest on Trafalgar Square

I read this weekend FT’s Mrs Moneypenny – who I love – raving enthusiastically about her artist friend – who she loves. The artist Angela Palmer has been collecting tree stumps from a rainforest in Ghana, and this week exhibited these stumps on Trafalgar Square as part of an art piece entitled “Ghost Forest”.

One of ten tree stumps on Trafalgar Square

Angela’s statement about her exhibition says that “the connection between deforestation and climate change, and the challenge to express that visually, is the basis for my most ambitious and logistically challenging work yet. The concept is to present a series of rainforest tree stumps as a ‘ghost forest’ – using the negative space created by the missing trunks as a metaphor for climate change, the absence representing the removal of the world’s ‘lungs’ through continued deforestation…”

“…Many observers will see the stumps as beautiful sculptural objects; others will perhaps see the installation as a scene of devastation – perhaps evoking Paul Nash’s rendering of the stark landscape of the First World War where only the splintered tree stumps remain in the devastated land. Others may see the tree stumps posited in the no-man’s land between the past and the future – the past representing the life and growth of these trees, their potential, and what they provided biologically for the planet; while the future may signal, for some, an imperilled world, as the consequences of deforestation continues apace – another ‘New World’. For others the installation may represent an overt piece of political activism – a call to arms. I am equally comfortable with all responses.”

The exhibition will be shipped to Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference from December 7 – 18.

Read Angela’s full statement here. And if you’re in London tonight you can go to a panel debate at the Science Museum on at 7pm.

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