Forest: Fern Helfand

Fern Helfand’s recent body of work began in 2023, after the artist entered a fire-scarred forest near her West Kelowna home. Rather than a ruin, Helfand experienced the quiet beauty of charred trees, seeing in them not a loss but a trans- formation–similar to the way a fallen tree rises again as a carved pole (an instance of nature passing through, and into, culture). In her current exhibition, Helfand combines photography, moving imagery and ceramic sculpture to highlight the “visual complexity” that emerges after natural forms are stripped bare.

Like the photographs in her 2021 exhibition Timber, Lumber, Wood, Home at the Grand Forks Art Gallery, Helfand’s photographs begin as landscapes, only to be transformed through dig- ital (montage) processes from documentarian subjects to uncanny works of art. Yet where the photos in Timber, Lumber, Wood, Home spanned the transformation of the tree through a cultural process that begins in the forest and ends as a house, the trees in Forest appear more distinct from each other after they are scorched. Here, the uncanny is first brought about through wildfire, to be completed later by the artist’s hand.

Accompanying Helfand’s photographs and moving imagery are ceramic works derived from sections of boughs, stumps and tree trunks. These sections vary in colour, from living tones of light brown and yellow to expired ones of black and white. Taken together, the combination of sculpture and photography deepens the viewing experience, much like the bound stack of finished two-by-fours did in concert with the photos of Timber, Lumber, Wood, Home.

Exhibition reception Nov 6, 6–8pm

kelownaartgallery.com