Bradlee Shanks’ Crystalline Forest explores the quiet threshold between the natural world and the processes through which we attempt to hold onto it. Using photography as a point of departure, Shanks transforms images of woodland landscapes, drawn from both coastal environments and mountain forests, into dimensional serigraphs built through dense layers of ink. The resulting surfaces possess a rich, impasto-like quality, allowing the images to emerge physically as well as visually.
Within these works, trees appear as spectral presences, “ghost trees” suspended between image and object. Their forms seem at once solid and dissolving, as if crystallizing out of light and memory. Shanks’ meticulous layering of translucent and opaque inks creates a luminous depth that echoes the shifting atmospheres of the forests themselves: fog moving through branches, reflected light on water, the quiet geometry of trunks and limbs.
Rather than presenting the landscape as a fixed view, Shanks reveals it as something fleeting and continually reconstituted. The dimensional surfaces of the prints slow the act of looking, inviting viewers to move across the work and experience subtle changes in light, shadow, and texture. In this way, the images hover between photography, painting, and sculpture.
In Crystalline Forest, Shanks captures not just the appearance of trees, but their lingering presence—the way landscapes persist in memory long after we leave them. Through layered processes that echo the accumulation of time in the natural world, the works evoke a forest that feels both tangible and ephemeral, simultaneously rooted in place and suspended in imagination.