Ann de Forest.

Artist in Residence at Shillim

Medium: Walking and writing

Year: Ongoing​

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At Napeague, Ann continues to develop a sustained, place-based inquiry grounded in walking. She approaches walking as a primary mode of research and composition, through which landscape is gradually understood through bodily immersion. Each walk becomes a form of attunement—responsive to wind, sand, water, and terrain—where perception is shaped by shifting environmental conditions. This process is deliberately non-linear: knowledge accumulates over time through repeated return, what she describes as an accretion of experience.

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Her practice translates these embodied encounters into language through a hybrid and fragmentary form. The resulting texts resist conventional narrative progression in favor of vignettes, poetic fragments, and essayistic passages that aim to evoke presence rather than assert authorial interpretation. These writings function as a “dossier” or evolving archive, reflecting an ongoing process rather than a completed work. The openness of structure allows individual pieces to stand alone while also contributing to a larger, interconnected body of work.

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Napeague itself emerges in her work as a layered ecological and cultural system, where dunes, bogs, ocean, and infrastructure are understood as interconnected. Walking becomes a method of “stitching” these micro-ecologies into a single perceptual field. Alongside this spatial awareness, Ann engages with geological and historical frameworks—particularly glacial formations, erosion, and coastal change—as metaphors for accumulation, permeability, and transformation.​​

Napeague itself emerges in her work as a layered ecological and cultural system, where dunes, bogs, ocean, and infrastructure are understood as interconnected.