Signs of Summer: Keep Your Head Up

This is a sketch for an installation: The banner would be stretched between two snags that are hung up in one another, forming a natural "Caution" sign. And when the snags fall down, both the warning and the hazard dissapear. 

This is a sketch for an installation piece in a disturbed forest, where falling dead timber is a major hazard. Wearing a hard hat can lessen this risk. Do not forget that you are a target in the forest!

In our research group, we study changes occuring in the Hemlock Removal Plot at the Simes Tract, where all the hemlocks are girdled to simulate a mass simultaneous dieoff-- the kind of dieoff that is expected as a result of the widespread hemlock wooly adelgid infestation. The effects of the selective removal of hemlock are enormous and we are still trying to understand how our forests will respond to this dramatic change.

As part of our Environmental Sign Making workshop, artist and educator David Buckley Borden showed us how to combine images in the culture with scientific information to convey facts and attitudes about our research to a wide audience.