It’s the year 2222 and there are no more forests left on Earth. Human beings have polluted the planet into oblivion and decimated the forest floor, chopping down trees to make cheap furniture and other unnecessary junk. Desperate for fresh oxygen, the chirp of birdsong from the canopy, and the smell of rain on moss, people flock instead to Detroit’s Memory Forest.
You’ll have to use your imagination to envision this unnatural future but Lisa Waud has a few tricks up her sleeve that make her latest installation, Memory Forest, believable. In Memory Forest, the Detroit-based botanical installation artist uses tree branch cuttings, plastic flowers, cardboard boxes, and whatever else she could find in her garage to build the forest of a desolate future. It’s the first installation of a three-part series during her six-month residency in Milwaukee Junction’s Boyer Campbell Building.
The faint smell of charred wood warms the space like it’s being heated with a woodstove. As background music plays gently — falling between soothing ethereal sounds and the part in a horror movie when shit is about to get weird — I feel a mix of relaxation and impending doom.
“What if we’re in the future and there’s no more forests, and we need to build one from our best recollection? Will this do?” she asks adding, “It’s like dread, but make it colorful. I like to call it a technicolor dystopia.”
Pointy tree of heaven branches painted neon green, baby blue, and pastel pink jut out of wooden planks on the ground. Nearby, neon “moss” creeps up stacks of cardboard boxes resembling thick tree stumps. Plastic flowers hang upside down on a wall of chicken wire that Waud calls the “Inverted Meadow.”
“I was just really enjoying getting everything wrong,” she says when I ask why the meadow is inverted.
Before pursuing art full time, Waud worked as a florist and professional gardener for 12 years. She opened her former houseplant store Pot+Box in Detroit’s Fisher Building in late 2017. She produced her first large scale installation — an abandoned house in Hamtramck that she filled with living plants and flowers called Flower House — in 2015.
“I was absolutely hooked on large scale installations,” she says. “It took a few years, but eventually I made the decision to close my business and focus on art full time… in my art practice, I primarily use plants and flowers to create large-scale installations but in this one I really tried to focus on using materials that are recycled and can be recycled. I gathered all the inventory that I still have from the flower shop and gave myself the restriction of only using them.”
Memory Forest differs from Waud’s previous installations like Flower House and 2021’s aptly-named Party Store where she filled an abandoned party store with flowers. One of the only natural materials she uses here are branches spiraling down a slide suspended in the middle of the room and stretching toward the ceiling, like children’s fingers grasping for summer sun. Just watch out for their thorns.
Garden fencing remnants shaped like arrows stick out of milk crates like guardians trying to protect what’s already been lost.
“There’s a British artist who passed away recently, Phyllida Barlow, and she does a lot of work with very unfinished, very visible, not polished structures,” Waud explains. “I was really interested to experiment with that, coming from being a florist where things have to be absolutely perfect and show ready. It feels very cathartic for me to make a mess of things.”
Waud encourages people to bring lunch and drinks and have a picnic at Memory Forest, which she hopes offers them a “pause button” from their daily lives.
“There’s a lot of metaphors in the plant world and I think that’s why the work I do resonates with people… almost everyone has a relationship with plants,” she says. “While Memory Forest looks a lot different from my usual work, there’s a lot of natural materials and colors here. I think it can still offer that same pause button through the structure of a forest and kind of bringing together synthetic and natural materials together in that context.”
Memory Forest is on view until May 17 in the Boyer Campbell Building at 6532 St. Antoine St. The second part in Waud’s series, Petrichor, will see the building’s floor covered completely in living grass for a limited run from May 31 to June 2. “Petrichor” is the word for that earthy smell when rain hits dry soil, which Waud is hoping to recreate.
“I’m really interested in messing with people and making them feel like they’re outside when they’re inside,” she says.
The final installation, Portrait, will allow visitors to be crowned with 25-foot-tall floral headdress suspended from the ceiling on June 28 and 29.
More information is available at lisawaud.com.
