A Pure Spirit Grows Beneath the Bark of Stones by Amélie Labourdette

Like the eponymous verse of Gérard de Nerval’s poem, A Pure Spirit Grows Beneath the Bark of Stones celebrates an ontological pluralism in its effort to recognise a form of sensitivity and subjectivity in forest natural entities. This series echoes two bodies of images:

One testifies to the ancestral memory of primordial forests. Like original photographic prints, the fossils of the oldest forests on Earth found in the Middle Devonian Catskills (dating back 385 million years) embody the memory of these first forests through the phenomena of long and silent transmutations of plant into mineral.

The other reveals the vibrant spectrum of contemporary forests; the survival of an archaic spirit that manifests itself at the heart of the present forests.