Euan Forrester is doing some trailblazing work, or in this case trailbuilding. In his latest project, “Evidence of Trail Fairies,” Forrester created an outdoor art gallery along a new trail on one of the local mountains near Vancouver, Canada, where people can see how the trail was built as they are using it. He spent 9 months photographing 2 trailbuilders as they built the trail from scratch and chose 20 photos and made big prints of them that he hung along the trails. The photos themselves are printed with UV-resistant ink on a hard plastic material and then laminated. Forrester said it took some back-and-forth with the printer to make prints that are visible in the dim light of the forest. The photos will be hanging in the forest for about three months, although Forrester was told they would survive about six. He also made some posters to place at trail intersections, which have text that explains what the project is about, and maps to show where it begins and ends.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
In this series, Forrester wants to show the experience he observed of being a trail builder: appreciating the beauty of nature, caring for it, and being dwarfed by it. He was out for 35 days over the 9 months, and took a total of 21,262 frames that were edited down to 20. After the trail was finished, it took Forrester a year to choose the photos, write the captions, and make the prints. While he was out shooting, he got his camera pretty cold, wet, wet, and gritty over the course of the project, since he was out in the rain for hours at a time with no protection. He almost killed his camera a couple of times, and broke the autofocus motor in one of the lenses with too much grit.
Forrester wants to show the feelings of friendship, of pride, of adventure, of teamwork, of mentorship, of exhaustion, and of loneliness that he saw. He wants to show that a trail (or, this trail at least) is not some grand plan that unfolds, but rather a rough sketch that’s filled in, tested, and evolved as it’s built. Finally, he wants to show some of the special moments that happened along the way that not everyone gets to see. In addition, Forrester is offering an alternative to the “digital photo tsunami”: by placing a small number of photos in an unexpected and distraction-free location that many users visit repeatedly at a leisurely pace, he thinks this project is a counterpoint to many people’s usual method of viewing photos: clicking through them quickly on a computer screen.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
The trail and the installation are free and open to all users: walkers, hikers, runners, and mountain bikers. Forrester paid for the project completely out of his own pocket with no sponsorships or grants. The installation is temporary and will be up until September 2016. You can view more photographs of the project at his website.
