PALUS
Swamp Cinema Shadow Screens
Using sun and silhouette, we’ve devised variously shaped screens to define and highlight the dense swamp vegetation. Ephemeral images of lichen, red-osier dogwood, Sitka spruce, alder, fern, goatsbeard and horsetail emerge as motifs throughout the project, iterated as shadows, anthotypes and other forms. For this component of Palūs, we provide the screen and let the swamp project its own film on rare sunny mornings without fog.
Palus Prints
Employing the Gyotaku method, found flora and fauna are inked and printed directly on Japanese papers.
This red-spotted garter snake might have been warming itself on the road and killed by a car, or dropped by a bird of prey. It is a subspecies of the common garter snake that we have here, and it’s the only snake that regularly uses Sitka spruce swamps. Naturalist Andrew Emlen, who is contributing an essay to the upcoming Palūs publication, shared this link with us about the arms race between snakes and poisonous newts, which we also often see traversing the road to and from the swamp.
Bearded lichen (Usnea longissima) grows into long strands and hangs from the Sitka spruce and alder. Extremely sensitive to air quality, its fine, lung-like branching forms seem to breathe in the fog rising from the river and swamp.
