THIS WAS ONCE A FOREST: ON GLACIAL GROOVES, OLD-GROWTH FORESTS, AND ANCIENT SEABEDS (2025)

Last summer, I began an ongoing conversation with curators Theresa Bembnister from CAC and DJ Hellerman from the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (to which the show will travel in 2026). We talked about Ohio, the environment, nature, and sustainability, and how one might make artwork that asks visitors to understand Ohio’s sense of nature in a new way.

Then in the fall, I made several trips to Caesar Creek State Park and Davey Woods State Nature Preserve, both in Ohio. When engineers cut away an emergency spillway at Caesar Creek, they inadvertently exposed an ancient sea bed (nearly 450 million years old). I loved walking among all of the fossils and listening to their sounds.

At the Davey Woods State Nature Preserve, I focused on the many old-growth trees that dot the landscape. Throughout the 19th century, Ohio lost over 90% of its forests due to deforestation. It is hard for me to imagine what it looked like only a few hundred years ago.

And then finally, this spring I traveled up to Kelleys Island on Lake Erie with my friend Kevin Davison, who was helping me document each location. We took a ferry across choppy waters to the island and visited some glacial grooves there, carved into the limestone. A friendly park ranger allowed us onto the rock, and we played like kids while filming and recording. The grooves looked like one of those giant State Fair slides, where we would sit on burlap sacks and speed down its humps and slopes. Again, it was hard to fully comprehend the glaciers that were once there, and the mark they made on these rocks. And to add to this mystery, Kelleys Island is also a place where my great-grandmother and her ancestors lived, and I found myself walking through the very same places where she grew up.

I was attracted to these places because they changed my perspective on Ohio, how I experience time and the past, and how I understand my place in the world. Normally, I work with archives to find material for my projects. In these places, however, the land itself is an archive, and I loved looking for traces of the past that are written into the trees, the rocks, and the water. 

As I started to put all of this material together, I realized how important time is to this piece. The more I paid attention to the land, time shifted and expanded. I could see how the landscape was radically different not only 450 million years ago, or 14,000 years ago, but only two centuries ago.