Conceptual Quickies - The Forest

The idea behind Conceptual Quickies is to provide some starting points and ideas that can be used in the context of various art projects. Today we take a quick and dirty look at "the forest" and what it can stand for.

The forest is nature's metropolis, home of the wild and also keeper of secrets. It's an important symbol in art, literature, philosophy, psychology and even sociology and as such has many facets. On one had it's a symbol of life, growth, fertility and richness, easily seen in the various creatures inhabiting its many layers that are indeed structured intricately like a city. On the other hand it's a symbol of eternity, obscurity, death and the world of ghosts and gods. It's not difficult to look at the trees like pillars carrying the nave of a living cathedral. Trees in general are often seen as links between Heaven and Earth. In Norse mythology the world tree Yggdrasil connects the various worlds of gods, creatures and Man. The rune Algiz can be interpreted as a tree offering strength and the gods' protection. In some religions the forest is associated with untamed nature and heathenism while others regard it as a place of spiritual growth and awakening. If a character wants to communicate with the gods, he usually takes one of two possibilities: He either visits an actual church (or another holy building) or he visits the woods as the church of nature; sometimes also represented by a single, often holy, tree.
And at the same time characters often see themselves confronted with something ghostly and evil hiding between the trees to watch them and to hunt them, because they entered another world that has its own rules and its own creatures.

The forest is the border between the known and the unknown, and simultaneously the border between civilization (human culture) and the wild (the uncivilized and that what hasn't been cultivated). The forest can represent the wild state of everything while human culture is a self-made construct that sets itself apart from this wilderness to create structure within the structureless. Whatever inhabits the woods belongs to the wild and chaotic and when it enters our civilization, we mistake it as some kind of monstrosity that doesn't belong. Something feral to be afraid of and something that threatens our civilized, orderly world.

This makes the forest to something exotic, but also to a place where the dark, the obscure and the monstrous lives. In scary stories the evil beast usually inhabits the forest or escapes into it, forcing the protagonist to follow it into the unknown and to confront it in its world of darkness and danger. With this the forest is a symbol of crossing worlds – not only of the known and the unknown world or the civilized and the uncivilized world, but also a crossing from childhood to adulthood – from naivety to understanding. The winding paths lead people astray, confuse them, let them get lost or take them to new yet unknown places. A child that goes into the woods to face the wild and to encounter his deepest fears will return as a man. With this the forest cannot only be seen as a female symbol of life, secrecy and growth, but also as a male symbol of fear, animality and strength. It gives life, transforms life and takes it. In a sense the forest is the primordial mother that grants life, that protects, hides and comforts, but at the same time it's the father who challenges, confronts, exposes and destroys. This ambivalence makes the forest to a potentially scary place of uncertainty, because nobody can know whether it's actually benign or malicious. Sometimes it's both, just as it can be innocent and tainted at the same time. The line between good and evil, between reality and fantasy and between light and darkness becomes blurry.

The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung interpreted the forest as a place of self-reflection and self-understanding. For him it's a playground of danger and suppressed fears that mark the transition into mental adulthood.
A person who manages to survive being alone in the woods will not only discover his most inner traits and powers but will also become part of the wild after whose rules he has learned to play – rules that sometimes are in odds with the laws and regulations of the civilized world up to a point at which the "wild man" can become a monster himself.


Might be continued