Berrien Springs based artist Nick Collard shares his new installation Forest, a photographic journey documenting the artist’s routine walks in the forest behind his home. Three impetuses drive the project:

The first impetus has been an impulse toward creative communion: an impulse to interact with, to develop a familiarity with and make my own, to immerse myself in and become a part of areas that form the ambiance of this general environment.

The second impetus, which links up with the first, has been a pull not just to an area close by (the forest edge aligns with my backyard) but also to a concentrated area of nature in which I enter into that creative interaction with what I feel to be a symbol for the source of creative potential and creative activity. The key characteristic of my photographic method for this project has been this intuitive, prompt, receptiveness with which, through the act of composing and making photographs, I come into contact with the source of my own creative ability.

The third motive, the one that I was quite aware of when I began to make photographs for this project, was to flesh out a particular motif that I’d come across in an image that belonged to a previous project of mine. This motif is comprised of what to me are examples of characteristic natural elements made to interact with one another in a way that suggests Nature’s common, raw, organic state while also impressing a numinous quality on the viewer.