Ann de Forest.

Artist in Residence at Shillim

Medium: Walking and writing

Year: 2024​

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Ann’s artwork centers on the translation of embodied experience into writing, using walking as both generative practice and conceptual framework. Her process begins with direct engagement: she enters a landscape without prior research, allowing sensory perception—movement, texture, rhythm—to guide her understanding. The body operates as an instrument, responding to terrain through pacing, direction, and attention. From this experiential foundation, her work shifts into language, which she treats as a flexible, exploratory medium.

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Instead of recounting events in sequence, she constructs hybrid writings that include fragments, vignettes, essays, and poetic passages. Her work accumulates and emerges gradually through layering rather than resolution. Just as landscapes are shaped by forces of accumulation and erosion, Ann's writing evolves through addition, revision, and an openness to incompletion.

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A key aim of Anne’s work is to foreground place rather than the individual observer. While her presence is implicit, she avoids centering herself, instead creates a field in which the environment—its textures, histories, and interconnections—can emerge. Her ongoing dossier-like project reflects this ethos, functioning as an archive, sketchbook, and evolving manuscript. It brings together discrete pieces that can stand alone yet also contribute to a larger, interconnected whole.

Collaboration and encounter also shape her work. Walking with others introduces alternative perceptions, vocabularies, and emotional registers, which enter her writing as shifts in perspective or tone. Similarly, research—geological, historical, linguistic—enters after the fact, enriching rather than directing the initial experience.

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