{"id":28083,"date":"2026-09-24T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clothildelasserre.com\/?p=28083"},"modified":"2026-09-24T15:27:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:27:01","slug":"why-forests-new-page-nature-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clothildelasserre.com\/en\/why-forests-new-page-nature-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Why forests \u2014 a new page to tell the story behind the work"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past few days there has been a new page<\/strong> on this site: The Nature series \u2014 the forest, a living system<\/em><\/a>. It tells not what I paint or sculpt \u2014 other pages do that \u2014 but why I have made the forest the central subject of my work for some years now<\/strong>. A short text, anchored in three books and one hypothesis. Here is what it contains, and why I wanted it to exist.<\/em><\/p>\n

What Suzanne Simard demonstrated<\/h2>\n

A few years ago, a Canadian biologist named Suzanne Simard demonstrated, through years of field experiments, what foresters had long suspected without daring to say it: the trees of a forest communicate with one another. They exchange resources. They warn one another of danger. They feed, as a priority, the young shoots around them.<\/p>\n

And all of this passes through a network the eye cannot see \u2014 a network of fungal filaments called mycorrhizae<\/strong>, which connect the roots beneath the surface of the soil.<\/p>\n

What appears at human height as a competition for light \u2014 each tree pulling towards the sky, straining towards the available space \u2014 turns out, at root height, to be a gift economy<\/strong>. The largest trees, what Simard calls mother trees<\/em>, redistribute water and carbon to the weaker, the younger, those that would not otherwise hold on.<\/p>\n

I read Simard in 2022. What I read, I was already painting.<\/em><\/p>\n

The crowd, the forest \u2014 the same weave<\/h2>\n

For more than twenty years I have been observing and painting crowds. Seen from above, generally. Landscapes crossed by silhouettes that walk, gather, disperse. What I was looking for in those compositions was not the individuals. It was the weave<\/strong>. What connects them without their necessarily noticing it. What makes a crowd alive when each of the people in it often feels alone.<\/p>\n

When I began to paint forests, a few years ago, I did not feel I was changing subject. I felt I was continuing.<\/p>\n

The trees that appear in my recent canvases \u2014 Flamboyant<\/em>, Un jour d’\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>, L’heure pourpre<\/em> \u2014 never stand alone. They are close together, intertwined, leaning against others. The palette moves away from the expected green: it turns blue, turquoise, pink and red-brown \u2014 not to decorate, but because what interests me is not what the forest looks like<\/em>, it is what it does<\/strong>. What it makes you feel. What it makes you understand.<\/p>\n

In the recent canvases, the crowds seen from above have become stands of trees<\/strong>. Each trunk is unique. None stands alone.<\/p>\n

Kropotkin, Kimmerer \u2014 two books that accompany the work<\/h2>\n

Beneath this reflection lie two other books that have accompanied the studio for a long time.<\/p>\n

Peter Kropotkin<\/strong>, who wrote in 1902, in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution<\/em>, that cooperation, as much as competition, was a driver of survival. A counter-reading of poorly digested Darwinism, which recalled \u2014 more than a century ahead of time \u2014 what genetics and ecology would later confirm. Kropotkin observed ant hills, hives, flocks of birds. From them he drew a simple proposition: where mutual aid unfolds, the species survives.<\/p>\n

Robin Wall Kimmerer<\/strong>, botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, who takes mycorrhizae as the model for a gift economy applicable to human communities<\/strong>. Her sentence, in Braiding Sweetgrass<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

All flourishing is mutual.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To hear it properly, one must remember that Kimmerer is a scientist. What she offers is not a fine idea. It is a verified fact \u2014 extended by analogy to what that fact might tell us about ourselves.<\/p>\n

A working hypothesis, and a way of making it visible<\/h2>\n

I did not come out of twenty years in the studio with a manifesto. I came out with a working hypothesis<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The hypothesis: our societies work on the same principle as Simard’s forest. Beneath the visible surface of the individual \u2014 beneath what our social networks, our CVs, our annual appraisals make legible \u2014 there is a mesh of solidarities that connects and supports us. Extended families. Long friendships. Professional collectives. Shared territories. As discreet as the mycorrhizal network.<\/p>\n

When that mesh tears, the individual falters \u2014 even when they believe they depend on no one but themselves. When it holds, it makes growth, risk-taking and resilience possible.<\/p>\n

This is not idealism. It is what forest ecology has been showing for thirty years, and what sociology and anthropology have been recounting for a century.<\/p>\n

In the studio, I try to make that palpable \u2014 without saying it<\/strong>. To paint in order to show, not to prove.<\/p>\n

From burnt forests to white porcelain \u2014 sculpture carries it on<\/h2>\n

For the past year, the painting has continued into sculpture. Black stoneware. Porcelain.<\/p>\n