Forest Ghost
public art
2021
"Forest Ghost" is a public art sculpture dedicated to the theme of forest fires. The Hotspot stats project is taken as a basis of a sculpture. Hotspots are active fire detections and thermal anomalies, such as volcanoes, and gas flares. Fires can be set naturally, such as by lightning, or by humans, whether intentionally or accidentally. Hotspots stats is a Greenpeace project where you can find statistics on natural fires in almost any region of the planet since 2001. The data for the region where the sculpture is installed is translated into 3D, by layers, where each layer stands for one year.
This is how the central part of the sculpture is formed – the body of the "ghost". Then, based on the 3D model, a sculpture is made of burnt wood. In essence, the forest ghost represents a collection of data that takes on an aesthetic dimension while removing access to the information itself. We no longer see the specific data in the form of bar charts. What we witness is a being, whose representation is dictated by information rather than by the artist’s will.