32”w x 32”l x 52”h
Glass, burned tree branches, steel, ash

Artist Statement:

I joke that as a child growing up in the lap of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, I knew more trees than people. My family named trees in our yard—Old Guy was a 200+ old Ponderosa Pine that died from a lighting strike. His stump acts as a grave marker that still elicits an anecdotal memory whenever my dad passes by it. Both the forests and the trees were and are held in reverence as sentinels of not only of earthly time but ours. A neighborhood where I used to live burnt down completely nearly two decades from when I moved away; the once plush forest now barren. I cried for months passing by every time I passed by and remembered looking through the trees of my bedroom window. Is it still beautiful? One might argue more so or less, depending on the perspective. But this might be a different kind of beauty. I personally hold a lot of conflicting ideas of forests and fire. The forests are dear to me and so is the nostalgia for how they have looked. However, the more I learn about fire and its relationships to a healthy forest (and what a healthy forest should or might look like) I wonder how I might let my vision of a forest evolve. For context, much of my work stems from seeing a place I lived and work in transform over decades due to increasingly intense and frequent wildfire. I grew up in Colorado, moved away for several years and then returned. Between leaving and moving back, I noticed the incremental shifts from intermittent and slower burning fires to those larger, more severe, and frequent. As part of Disturbance, I was fascinated by how complicated living with fire and how knotty the discussions can become as we explore what the future relationship may look for us and the forest. Do we manage them? Do we not? Every option seems to hold consequences that may be prophylactic, vital, and sometimes dire.

When creating Sl(ash), I returned often to the complicated narratives that surround prescribed burns, the strange beauty and pain by seeing fire in a familiar place, and how the memory of the forest shifts and transforms post-fire. They can go as planned and sometimes not. Loving the forests that I knew and seeing them change is difficult; so was the realization that the absence of fire may have created an unrealistically plush landscape that contributed—with other factors of course—to the mega-fires that occur more frequently with each passing year. As varied as the views we can hold, I find fire fascinating as it also an embodiment of dualities; it creates and destroys; warps time by creating room for future growth yet using the past as fuel. Envisioned as a piece that explores these dualistic narratives, Sl(ash) acts as an artifact of a process starting as a “slash pile,” a forest management practice that involves collecting dead or felled wood that is later burned as part of a prescribed fire. Like how are forests hold moments of past, present, and future, I envision Sl(ash) as a time capsule that holds traces of the past, a canvas for the moment of ignition in the process of making space for the future.

Artist Bio:

As an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and educator, Mandy Lee’s research-based practice examines narratives between environmental, material, political, and human histories. Recent work explores environmental change in Colorado, where she spent part of her childhood and currently resides, and explores the industrial heritage of Czech glassmaking through a socio-environmental lens. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, and a variety of exhibition spaces including Galerie Sýpka in Czechia, site-specific installation held in the Ladd Observatory at Brown University, various galleries in Rhode Island, and published in Corning Museum of Glass’ New Glass Review, the annual juried “exhibition in print.” She was a ’22-’23 Fulbright grantee in Czechia.

Her studio practice functions as a process-based laboratory focused on multi-perspective storytelling through a variety of mediums including artifacts of industrial production, glass, ash, and wood. Responding to certain questions and related research, the work is often defined by artifacts of a process. Current investigations address nuanced forms of large-scale loss, including shifts in Czechia’s glass industry and landscape transformation caused by increasingly severe wildfires in north-central Colorado with themes of loss/regeneration. As part of a 2022–2023 Fulbright grantee in Czechia, Lee developed a body of work responding to the country’s 700-year glass tradition that spanned artistic craft, mass production, relationship to local resources, and architectural application. Working across sculpture, video, and installation, Lee interweaves personal experience with elements of material culture to register what is lost, regenerated, or reformed as environments and industries change.

Scientists Statement:

SHIFTING BASELINES

(shif-ting base-lines)

What does a healthy forest look like?

We often answer that question from memory. The forests of our childhood — or the landscapes we first came to know and love — can become our reference for what is natural, beautiful, or whole.

Ecologists call this tendency “shifting baseline syndrome.” Each generation experiences a beloved forest at one moment in a much longer history and may come to regard those conditions as normal. But the forest we remember may itself be the product of changes that occurred before we arrived.

Many forests familiar to us today developed after more than a century of grazing, logging, fire exclusion, and fire suppression. Where frequent surface fires once limited tree establishment and consumed woody fuels, their absence allowed many forests to become dense walls of green instead of open parks of far fewer, but much more vigorous trees.

A slash pile is evidence of a land manager’s attempt to restore a dense forest to one that is less stressed, more resilient. Trees and branches removed during thinning projects are piled for later burning when conditions allow as managers work to reduce fuels and move forest structure and composition toward conditions more consistent with its ecology and historical condition. Pile burning is time- and cost-effective, making it a useful approach when managers are trying to restore thousands of acres of unhealthy forest.

The result can create a striking contradiction: A recently thinned forest—with cut trees, slash piles, open ground, and fewer green crowns—may look damaged compared with a familiar baseline of dense, continuous forest. Yet ecologically, that human-caused disturbance is intended to restore processes and structures that characterized the landscape before that familiar forest developed.

Our attachment to the forests we know is real. So is the discomfort—even grief or repulsion—we may feel when restoration dramatically changes how those forests look.

But that reaction is shaped by our baseline. Many of us learned to recognize dense, continuous forest as healthy and natural, even when those conditions are historically unusual and ecologically stressed. Restoration can look destructive precisely because it challenges that familiar image. Understanding shifting baselines asks us to reconsider not only what a healthy forest looks like, but where our expectations of that forest came from in the first place.

PHOTOS BY ALEX CANCRO