Project Vision & Overview
“We Know This Forest” is a participatory, community-based art project that uses the forest as both literal landscape and metaphorical framework for understanding chronic illness, disability, and lived experience. Facilitated by artist Candace Garlock, the project invites participants to engage with questions of accessibility, anonymity, and community care within creative and narrative spaces. The forest itself becomes a site of inquiry: nonlinear, adaptive, interconnected, capable of growth amid decay, resilient through seasons of change. These qualities mirror the realities of living with chronic conditions—the unpredictability, the need to navigate around barriers, the interdependence of systems, the coexistence of life and loss.
Through participatory gatherings, community members will design and begin carving woodcut panels, cast their own feet, and develop the bases for those casts, contributing their bodily presence and personal narratives to a shared visual “forest.” The resulting installation—suspended woodcut prints overhead with separated plaster feet below—will create an immersive environment that evokes fragility, vulnerability, and the continuous human journey through suffering and healing. By making chronic and invisible forms of struggle visible in a shared space, the project fosters empathy, compassion, and dialogue among participants and viewers, inviting them to recognize their own bodies and stories within the metaphorical woods.
There is a blogging and book component to the project, so participants will be able to write about their experiences, similar to what was documented in The Honeycomb Project and NV AWE: Tiny Treasures.