Ann Klefstad

I live in the room with no ceiling—my home is the world of forest and water. I strive to create work mimetic to my experience here, which will evoke both the grace of the natural world and the discomfort of its fit with our built world.

My forest environments, painted in tar on plywood, are taken from  the forest that I walk through every day. They’re created from substances that are dual: plywood is the flesh of trees, peeled and glued into modular sheets. This is a great material; it enables use of smaller timber from second-growth forests.  It is a transformation, positive on one side, negative on the other. The tar I use is asphaltum, a natural substance that is the million-year-old elixir of ancient forests—the carbon remnant of a forest that lived once, like ours.