(this post is a work in progress)
When in 2019 our former family forest got cleared, me, nor my mother – the owner of the land – had heard of the European spruce bark beetle. Even up til now, I’ve never actually seen an Ips typographus, apart from some withered larvae remains. Most people encounter the beetle by its symptoms – dead, or dying spruce – or by the most compelling evidence of its passing: the tunnel-patterned pieces of bark littered on the ground.
Ips typographus tunnels are also known as galleries. They are left in bark and bast fibre, where bark beetle larvae hatch and munch their way out into the Great Wide Open. There are numerous kinds of bark beetles, all with a preference for different tree species and all leaving a variety of gallery patterns. The genus Ips is known as the engraver beetle, and though Ips typographus is not the only kind leaving particularly intricate galleries, it finds itself amongst the most sophisticated and recognisable.
Note: all images are credited to their respective artists, and where possible, sourced.
“Can insects create art?”, the Florida Museum wonders in this online exhibit.
A gallery of galleries
With works by Nele Möller, Marjolijn Dijkman, Jacob Dwyer, Suze Woolf, Stefania Rigoni, Ulrika Krynitz, Art Lab Gnesta, Jim Frazer, Stach Szumski, Alexandra Crouwers, Ylva Eklöv, Léonie Von Saldern …
Nele Möller
The Forest Radio is a live stream radio transmission from a bark beetle infested site in the Thuringian Forest (close to Ilmenau) and is part of the long-term research project ‘The Forest Echoes Back‘ by Nele Möller.
The project oscillates around the Thuringian Forest in the middle/eastern part of Germany. Due to climate collapse, the forest is changing/disappearing at a rapid speed.
The Thuringian Forest is an ancient grown forest, that exists since around 10.000 years. But in the last two centuries, since the beginning of industrialisation, it got transformed into a monoculture of fast and straight-growing spruce trees which now have a tough time battling the dry and hot climate. The resilience of the trees is thus very low, and a huge bark beetle infestation accelerates the dying of the forest even more. To prevent the spread of the bark beetle, the forest management answers with extensive clear-cuts to remove the “infected” trees.
Marjolein Dijkman
Déja Vu at Vents des Forêts.
Marjolijn Dijkman created a sculpture from shrapnel collected in the fields and forests marked by the conflict of 14-18. These residues of rusty metals assembled with each other are now strangely reminiscent of the bark of spruce trees ravaged by the bark beetle. This artificial tree forms the replica of a dead beech, echoing the camouflage and observation structures designed in 1915 in Toul in the studio of the painter Lucien-Victor de Scaevola for the French army. (from: Vents des Forêts)
Jacob Dwyer
One Thousand Dead Beetles is a soundalk that leads listeners into a forest. Guiding the journey is a voice who, standing amongst the trees, wonders what’s behind the bark.
“Within the work’s swampy tangle of subjects is the bark beetle and its catastrophic outbreak that, due to warming temperatures, is spreading across the planet, destroying forests.
The piece was recorded binaurally in the spruce studded forests of Älvsbacka (Sweden) where it’s also intended to be experienced on headphones. I’m currently working to adapt it into a soundwalk that can be experienced in any forest but for now, if you’d like those Swedish GPS coordinates and a sound file of the full version, please get in touch.
One Thousand Dead Beetles was realised whilst on residency at Hybrida AIR 2023. It contains vocal contributions from fellow artist Sigrun Gyða and ex moose hunter/amateur animal impersonator, Gösta Ljungberg.”
Alexandra Crouwers
In 1964, Crouwers’ grandfather bought a parcel of land in the South of The Netherlands, covered with small spruce. Over the course of the following decades, the spruce grew into a dense stand, which the family would call ‘the little forest’. Of course, this ‘forest’ was not a healthy forest at all, but a monoculture plantation of a tree species that was more at home in colder climates.
The ‘little forest’ started to show signs of trouble: lower ground water levels, drought- and heat stress, and increasing nitrogen deposits caused the trees to deteriorate. After a particularly heavy storm in the drought-ridden year of 2018, the spruce bark beetle landed into the windfall. A year later, all spruce had died, and the plot was cleared.
Crouwers’ uses the evidence of the spruce bark beetle’s passage – in the form of chewed bark – as a way to find out what this outbreak is telling us. The beetle is both a canary in the coal mine and an ‘agent for change’ (as Nele Möller describes it so eloquently).
Léonie Von Saldern
Project Title: Beetle Convicted After Spruce Found Dead, hosted by De Fabriek during the Dutch Design Week in October 2023.
Project Introduction:
Germany witnesses the greatest biological loss of forests in history. It is said to be caused by the overpopulated bark beetle. However, climate change, planting of spruce monocultures, war reparations, political decisions and eventually human neglect and ignorance have all played a major part.
In the midst of the distorted relationship between man and nature, I follow the branch of development on the non- human side. My work allows me to change perspective and find a voice in these happenings. I feel the urge and responsibility to educate and raise awareness about the destruction of ecosystems by humankind. From the investigation and critical observation of the environment, I seek out the complexity of scenarios and guide the audience through an informed narrative.
Spruce tree as commercial artefact
Visiting my grandparents close to Cologne, I was observing and capturing the forest catastrophe from a young age on. Over the years, the green landscape turned light brown. And today, it turned into kilometre-long spruce log piles. It is said to be caused by the overpopulated bark beetle. However, climate change, planting of spruce monocultures, war reparations, political decisions and eventually human neglect and ignorance have all played a major part. The forest was transformed into a factory with the tree being the product – a product prone to diseases and natural events, such as the bark beetle infestation. To give an idea of the scale, the commercialised spruce tree is by far the most used and thus the most important wood in Europe.
Spruce tree as political issue
The history falls decades back into the time after WW2, when Germany had to pay war reparations. Cologne is located in the west of Germany, which is a former British zone. The British cut down forests in the western part of Germany to cover their wood shortage, which the newspaper article header Mehr Holz für England (more wood for England) stresses. This falls back to the political agreements made at the Yalta Crimea Conference in 1945 by the “Big Three”.
Since Germany’s economy was down, fast revenues were needed. Growing fast and densely, the spruce tree seemed like a wooden saviour to grow Germany out of its misery. But because many men died in war or were still prisoners of war, women were pulled to the front to clean debris and reforest the robbed land stripes in geometrically arranged spruce monocultures, each with a distance of 75 cm, identical with the sculptural arrangement on the wall. Later on, the women were called culture or debris women and were acknowledged on a 50 pfennig coin, equivalent to their hourly rate, when the new currency in Germany was introduced in 1948. The two-step aluminium casts turn negative space positive and are evidence of today’s condition.
Spruce tree as global seal
The three yellow protruding container seals on the wall with the signatures of the “Big Three” (Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill) symbolise the decisions made on which the forest dieback is based. The heap of seals below them stands for the shipping of the beetle wood. Because around 80% of the spruce is packed in containers and sent for export. More than 50% of it goes to China, where it is processed and shipped back. The reason: the industrial effort to adapt the machines to the new mass of logs is too great. The ventilation tubes on the wooden pallet represent the commercialised tree trunk. The bark beetle trace under the pallet shows the prevalence as well as the utility of the wood, which is the essence of this catastrophe.
Text taken from the description on the DDW website.
Suze Woolf
Suze Woolf works with printmaking, ceramics, watercolors and unique book objects, or rather, book sculptures. Inspired by eco-anxiety, she made a range of books objects using bark beetle tunneled wood integrating the patterns as its puzzling textual content.
Woolf sent me an email after she encountered The Compositor / Composing online. I already knew of her work before, since it’s almost the first to pop up when searching for bark beetle related art. The book objects in her body of work are stunning: not just concept-wise or aesthetically, but the technical execution is, at least to a relatively intangible artistic practitioner as myself, awe-inspiring.
The text below is taken from this website:
“Seattle-based artist Suze Woolf first noticed evidence of bark beetles while hiking in the Cascades. As most Scarabs know, scolytid bark beetle females lay their eggs along a gallery they excavate under tree bark, to which the larvae add when the eggs hatch. These squiggles caught Woolf’s eye when she saw them on fallen bark pieces. “They look very much like a strange script that we just can’t read,” she says.
The resemblance to written language inspired Woolf to create a series of 40 (and counting) unconventional books that incorporate bark beetle tracks in different ways. One, called Survivorship, was inspired by the chemical warfare that takes place between mountain pine beetles and the trees they choose as hosts. The cover is an actual slice of beetle-engraved log; the pages contain ink reproductions of beetle tracks overlaid on the genetic code for monoterpene synthase, one of the enzymes that trees use to generate defensive chemicals. Other books in Woolf’s series incorporate other bits of scientific data. “They teach me things I didn’t know,” Woolf says of her scientific collaborators. “I get ideas I wouldn’t otherwise get.”
Below, a video about the project:
Visit The Bark Beetle Books vol. I – XL on Woolf’s website. Here’s a link to ‘What the Beetles Sang’ on Youtube: a video with audio based on Woolf’s ‘Bark Beetles Book Vol. 39’ by Aldo Daniel Rivera Rentería.
Stefania Rigoni
Rigoni graduated in 2022 from the Sandberg Institute’s ‘Studio for Immediate Spaces’ program in Amsterdam, with a project centered on Ips typographus, which I stumbled upon via an Instagram post. We connected, and recently she wrote to me that during her research, she moved into labyrinth territory, where she encountered the 1941 short story ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths‘ by Jorge Luis Borges – which coincidentally keeps returning in my own work. It seems we meet in this labirinthic garden, on the junction of the Sandberg Institute – me being a 2001 alumni – and eco-anxiety.
Stefania Rigoni (1994) is a spatial and visual practitioner. Her research interests usually fall into the material and immaterial traces left by the frictions and conflicts disrupting our time, it being the past, the present or the future. The formal outcomes vary constantly, and are tailored for the need of each project: from publications and visual researches to performances and installations.
Below, a text by Rigoni on her encounters with Ips (via this link).
A few months ago, I stumbled upon a picture that caught my attention. It’s a picture taken in the mid 20s of the last century, in a valley close to my hometown in the northeastern mountains of Italy. It shows a phase in the process of reforestation undertaken after the devastation left by WWI: a proud man stands, in a field covered by melting snow, in front of a haystack. All around him and up until the background, straight rows of tiny spruce plants have recently been planted.
Those trees could now be a thick and dense forest of spruce, but they could also be among the hundreds of thousands of plants fallen after the passage of Storm Vaia, at the end of 2018. In one night, an exceptionally strong wind wiped to the ground whole forests made particularly fragile precisely from the way in which they were planted many decades prior. The close proximity, in straight ordered lines, of the same species of trees, planted in the same moment, has proven a fatal choice. The event has been emotionally and economically shocking: entire landscapes have been drastically modified, bearing the loss of an immense amount of timber and the need for a (still nowadays) non-stop employment of labour and resources to restore the damaged areas.
The urgency of a constant effort to clean up comes from the need to contain the ultimate fragility that the monocultural forestation policy of the XXth century carries: parasites. The Ips Typographus is a beetle of 5 mm that attacks dying Spruces, but in extraordinary conditions it can attack also healthy plants. With the amount of specimens fallen four years ago, the Ips Typographus has thrived to the point of now being the primary danger to the stability of the ecosystem of my hometown’s forests. I started being fascinated (not in a positive or negative sort of judgment) by the clash of temporal, spatial and proportional scales suddenly collapsing onto one another and revealing themselves in the traces left by both the wind and the insects. Cary Wolfe and Maria Whiteman have also been stricken by a similar situation.
In an article called “Landscape and Inscription” they refer to the devastating effects of a parasite decimating the woods of Texas, and frame their interest with words that match my thoughts. “…the fallen pines of the Front Range are traces of something both there and not there, the graphic materialisation and registration of factors and forces at scales both above and beneath the domesticating world of the human who looks at nature and composes a landscape. For us, this asymmetry and asynchronicity of scales in both time and space are captured in the difference between the lowly mountain pine beetle, at a mere five millimetres long, and the vastness of the landscapes—entire mountain ranges, in fact—altered by its presence under quite ecologically and historically specific conditions.”
The factors and forces referred to in the article can also be called hyperobjects, those objects “…that “are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” and thus in a fundamental sense defy thought—certainly representational thought.” as argued in the same article by Wolfe and Whiteman, citing in this passage their colleague Timothy Morton. The traces left by hyperobjects are therefore one of the only ways that allow us to perceive the vastness and the impacts of their existence in our life as well as in the life of other species, revealing an underlying and inescapable interconnectedness of fates. However, what is inescapable is also the way in which as humans we perceive and react. Our bodies and the means we use to organise our lives can hardly be sublimated and overcome, and are the only tools we have to relate to others. I therefore started to look at what these relational tools are and what is their impact–for good or for bad.
I came back to look at the picture from the 20s. Grids and straight lines are among the most used spatial arrangements in the history of humankind. Used to separate space evenly, its employment allows also the representation of said space thanks to its scalability properties; that’s how maps are born. Fragmenting materiality in equal quantities allows for a better management of complexity, but it’s at times a dysfunctional way to relate to space and others. My project is a quest on the perception alterations we impose but also experience. Through the means of reproduction techniques of scales and grids I’m trying to link our understanding of the world in relation to the one of a much tinier individual, in the cosmos we both inhabit.
Stach Szumski
Szumski is a visual artist working in various media “through conceptual-interactive activities in which he critically examines the washed-out aesthetics of First World countries from folklore to purely intuitive, visual practices”. He’s a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Media Art in Warsaw.
Text from oxfluxo.net:
The story you are about to read – or perhaps rather be swallowed by – is written on the walls of the gallery space. The intervention was conducted by Stachu in collaboration with legions of bugs as a part of a long-lasting psychedelic therapy session. The goal of this interspecies cooperation was to visualize the fears and anxieties that stay in the way of a friendly coexistence of humans and bugs. Even though it may now appear as a creepy bark beetle bone chapel, the future will acknowledge it as something like a cave painting from the turbulent dusk of the Holocene, when Gregor S. was just a literature protagonist and the human-bug era was about to take off.
For most of his life, Stachu has lived in the Giant Mountains (believe me or not, this is the English translation for Krkonoše). Even though he is much less present in his family home these days, in the long summer months he enjoys his escapades into the wild. Walking from Bogatynia to Broumov and back and exploring the territories of the mountains, artificially divided by the state border. The border is understood as a meeting point of what we consider nature or natural and culture or artificial remains a constant element in Stachu’s work. The ornament-like forms appear on wooden bones eaten by the bark beetle. The aeographic gradients emerging from the surface of an abandoned building as if graffiti was some kind of a lichen, slowly covering every inch of concrete. Thick branches in the shape of skeleton hands, reaching out for you as in some kind of twisted Disney cartoon. And all of the silhouettes resembling stalactites, rocky mushrooms, cranks in the sandstones, gargoyles, and hazy devil heads. All of a sudden you realize that the origin of this murky gothic style that dominates Stachu’s work is derived directly from the forest – the darker, more human resilient side of the Giant Mountains.
— Berlinskej Model
Urnatur / Ulrika Krynitz
Urnatur is a design studio and ecological project in the Swedish area of Ödeshög. The Ips typographus inspired pattern ‘Gudrun: bark beetle larvae gnaws’ was designed by Ulrika Krynitz. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the fact that I actually know the area of Ödeshög quite well. It’s astonishingly near – only about 20 kilometres – the former home of artist and alchemist Lisa Jeannin, who made me an elixir as an aid when speaking about ecological grief.
From the webpage of the ‘Gudgrun’ cotton textile pattern:
…now or never…
After the heavy storms Gudrun and Per everybody who owned or worked with forest suddenly knew and recognized the deathly signs of the bark beetle larvae’s gnaws on the spruces inner bark. Sweden lost milliards of SEK. Everybody hated them. But for sure – don’t you agree they make a stylish and cool pattern?
Art Lab Gnesta
Art Lab Gnesta is an artist run initiative in the Swedish town Gnesta, not far from Stockholm. In an almost impossible universal knot, this too, is a hometown to Lisa Jeannin whom I mentioned in the previous entry. The project ‘Granbarkborretapeten’ by the Art Lab was found through social media.
I’ve made some attempts to organise a residency at the Art Lab, but at the time, the pandemic restrictions made planning ahead near impossible. Still, on my part, a stay at the lab is very much on the table.
Below the text from the website of Art Lab Gnesta.
The spruce bark wallpaper
The art work Spruce Bark Borretapeten has been produced by young people from Sörmland under the direction of Art Lab Gnesta. The work consists of a wallpaper printed with glue paint on recycled paper that reflects the pattern of the spruce bark drill. During the summer it will be available for sale in the farm shop at Nynäs castle .
After the dry summers of recent years, the spruce bark beetle has been seen more and more often – both in the forest and in the climate debate. The small borer is one of the insects that do the most damage in the dense spruce forests, and the monoculture of modern forestry combined with a warmer and drier climate has led to large infestations.
Squid Squad is Art Lab Gnesta’s project for young people interested in art and the climate. Together we work to learn more about the global shifts we are in the middle of, by combining different kinds of knowledge. We have approached the spruce bark borer through field studies in the forest together with the Nature Conservation Association Daga-Gnesta, and then reflect the borer’s pattern by drawing together. Instead of conflicting with it, we wanted to find other ways to understand the message of the spruce bark beetle. The result is a wallpaper that wants to remind you of the human imprint on everything else that lives.
The wallpaper is printed at Lim & handprint on the “Rosenmaskinen” which was manufactured in the late 19th century. The specially developed glue colors come in shades that associate with bark and resin. The spruce’s response to the borers’ attack is to release quantities of resin in an attempt to drown the borers. However, it is often too late.
Just in time for the spruce bark beetle to wake up to start swarming, the wallpaper will be sold in a limited edition, in the farm shop at Nynäs castle. The surplus goes to the work of the Nature Conservation Society.
The presentation of the spruce bark tapestry at Nynäs is the first part of a longer collaboration between Art Lab Gnesta and Nynäs Castle, where artists are invited to produce new works of art based on the landscape, the nature reserve and the layers of history found at Nynäs.
Frederik Vium
‘2nd. Chapter. And bark beetles mapped hidden worlds’ was a curatorial project by artists Frederik Vium and Cristina Rüesch at Frappant art space in Hamburg. Frederik Vium (b. 1996) studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg and works in the intersection between performance, sculpture and video.
Text taken from the website of frappant.org:
Follow the lines under the crust a landscape, a letter, a warm invitation to a sphere where shape-shifters and ambivalent creatures, magical disorders, relationshipsproducing counselors meet and nest. They create new worlds, that at first glimpse might seem uncanny – Where every little thing is active and vibrant – Where borders are substituted by networks.
This exhibition is the second chapter of a continuous exchange between eight artists. It started with the package show 1th. Chapter – Trying to Be a Spider that was sent into the world in April 2021.
Instead of the spider, this time the bark beetle is our host and storyteller.
➴ Do you want to take a walk on this dusty path with us? ♡
Jim Frazer
Text taken from artistsfromutah.org:
‘Glyphs’ is derived from the paths of bark beetle larvae that Frazer found etched into tree trunks in the woods. He’s been translating the Glyphs, which have the appearance of calligraphic characters, from works on paper to sculptural versions having the same shape but made of wood and copper. “I’m excited about this because the larger sculptural versions have a greater presence. My intention is to create something recalling a ceremonial object, with the idea that if something is presented as having special significance, it will encourage people to look more closely at it.”
Ylva Eklöf
(Translated from Swedish via DeepL from this page) “The theme in Nordingrå is forestry and the idea comes from Ylva Eklöf. She now lives in Stockholm but has previously lived in Nordingrå and is a member of the Nordingrå Artists’ Workshop. And it was there that her idea of the forest as a theme was hatched.
It was an ongoing clear-cut right here in Vännersta that gave the impulse. It was agonising to watch. We who worked in the collective workshop complained. I wanted to explore the feeling and relate to it in some way. Life here is characterised by forestry.
The logging trucks roared past and one day when she took a taxi to Ullånger, the driver told her that he had helped plant the very forest that was being felled.
Ylva Eklöf formulates her project idea as follows:
“The silence of the forest, the pattern of the bark, the smell of resin, the sound of the logging truck, the pulp mill’s column of smoke, the sight of the clear-cut and the smell of sulphurous ash evoke different feelings and thoughts in us. We four artists have explored our different relationships and perspectives on the use of the forest. From the forest as a place to be in to the forest as a raw material. A raw material we use daily in our workshops.”
