For the past seven months Fallen Leaves has documenting a seasonal cycle of a small forest section on the western outskirts of Ottawa, recorded from the ground as well as from the air during the final months before its clearing. While capturing the photos, I also captured audio and some video of the space, not with specific intent, but rather to recognize the experiential depth of the space beyond the frame of any photo.
F.E. Sparshott was one of Canada’s most prominent philosophers on the arts, his work was very influential in informing my methodology in this work. His position on the esoteric experiential understanding of natural landscapes was very effectively summed up by Allen Carlson’s statement, “nature is an environment and thus a setting within which we exist and which we normally experience with our complete range of senses as our unobtrusive background. But our experience being aesthetic requires unobtrusive background to be experienced as obtrusive foreground.” (Allen in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art)
After establishing the proximity and immediacy of our urban encroachment, the footage in the video begins quietly in summer and autumn. It showcases the canopy on the footsteps of Ottawa as it existed in the last full season before the clearing actions of Ottawa’s Schedule C17 began. As the sequences pass, the season moves into winter, and fallen leaves and snow cover the forest floor. Into January and February gaps appear where trees once stood, and the geometry of the landscape begins to change. Excavators, cross-sections of felled trees, and tread marks become the focus between the flakes of falling snow. Tree branches no longer dance, they lie still across a space that was once a complex ecosystem.
Despite the dramatic shift, the audio remains constant. An echo of the life which once occupied the region, much like the black and white is an echo of the formerly vivid fall canopies. These contrasts are intentional, preserving memory of life which will never return. In doing so, the video aims its lens at how urban sprawl affects ecological continuity. While this forest stood on the edge of Ottawa, the story it tells is hardly unique to us. By situating this local transformation within concerning global patterns, the project invites viewers to consider how the landscapes which shape our lives are quietly disappearing around us.