Farewell to the forest (or the Un-Making of, “the Making of Mordor”)

Welcome back Tech team fans!

Now as promised and without further ado here is the post detailing the de-intsallation of, “the forest” or, “the Forked Forest Path” by Olafur Eliasson to give it its proper introduction. This installation was part of the exhibition, “The Making of Mordor” which itself was part of the Black Country Echoes festival, you can find more on that here: (just click on these words for further enlightenment) but what you won’t find there is the story of how the forest came down. That is why you are here, you lucky people. Coincidentally if you haven’t already you should check out the, The Making of the ‘Making of Mordor’ Exhibition post it’s basically this post backwards but with a happier ending for the trees.

Now if you have read the making of… post you will know that this beautiful forest took us two weeks to prep the trees and a week to install them, it was a long winded but satisfying experience. To take the forest down took a single day and the unfortunate ending for the trees (don’t worry I won’t spoil the end by telling you what happened, I will leave that to the end) took a mere 2 hours or so and in contrast it was a little sad…

Firstly I’m going to break my own rules and show you a picture of the work in the gallery just because it’s not every day you see a forest in a gallery and also because I spent 3 weeks getting it in the gallery…

Next up are the (unwitting) stars of the making of… post, Cath and Jodie taking out the first tub truck of trees.

The picture above shows the forest being thinned out. I’m just going to put the rest of the photos in without explanation as it’s pretty self-explanatory…

There’s the last truck of trees to leave the gallery. It followed the others down to the chipper in the loading bay…

And that was the end of that. An art gallery forest of around 2000 trees takes up less than one truck load once chipped! Who would have thought.