Adriene Hughes

This project began as a series of photographs in 2017 taken during a forest fire in Washington State with the use of an infrared camera. The colors are an anomaly: they are the product of infrared light bending through smoke, combined with a chemical reaction in the leaves that registered a forest in the throes of distress. Scientists agree that forests are made up of communities of trees and plants that communicate with each other, and they interconnect through a fungal network that forms bonds between the trees’ roots, a phenomenon known as the mycorrhizal network. This network of fungi can spread over many miles, connecting thousands of trees to one another. The resulting colors in these photos, I believe, is the recording of this communication as the trees warned and defended each other of the impending fire.  

The intervention of embroidery into this work is my vision of what that fungal network—the biochemical and electrical signals—would look like if it were visible to the eye. Embroidery, seen as a technique historically reserved by the practices of women, is to lay claim to the photographic landscape under my terms as a craft-maker. I also believe the earth speaks to us in colors much like the chakras of Vedas philosophy: green represents the heart, blue the center of communication and red is the sacral root which ties us to the earth.  The colors created by infrared technology, and the thread I stitched into these photographs, was to tie my physical body to the etherical, and the etherical into the landscape.