Thick Time
An exploration of Clare Hewitt’s
Everything in the Forest is the Forest

by Tess Foley

Introduction

This essay argues that throughout the conception, production and dissemination of Everything in the forest is the forest, Clare Hewitt's reimagining of the photographic medium (Hewitt, 2025b) is a model for how humanity could craft deeper connections with the natural world. This essay will focus on how this is achieved through reconfiguring photography's engagement with time, in line with the 'deep' time scale on which the forest, and the ecological crisis, exists (Ginn, 2018, 214), and through a melding of scientific principles and technology with an artistic sensibility and an embodied ethical framework of reciprocity.

Everything in the forest is the forest constitutes an array of creative interactions with the forest over a five-year period from 2020 to 2025. Although the work is presented in a widely engaging and accessible exhibition (Impressions Gallery, 2025), it comprises a conceptually diverse and complex portfolio. Fortunately, there is an accessible human context to the work from which we can begin to explore the project.

At the time when she handcrafted and placed bird box shaped pinhole cameras into a circle of twelve oak trees, Hewitt had just given birth to her first child. Cemented into the photography industry, but not immune to its fickleness, she was anxious to find ways to keep making work (Hewitt, 2025a). The initial creative process also began in response to reports of loneliness in the areas close to the forest and the artist's home, and it was made through a Covid lockdown in which we were all shown how important social interactions are to our lives (Hewitt, 2025a; Groarke, 2020). Out of a combined recognition of one species’ loneliness and another’s interconnectivity, Hewitt looked to the trees for a way forward. In this, she was not alone. Around the start of the decade, 2019 to 2022 especially, there was a generative burst of books and exhibitions about forest ecology (Roe, 2025, 142).

Through the curious and empathetic way in which she engaged with the forest, Hewitt found her own approach, one that has stretched the medium of photography into something capable of meeting such a holistic, and vital, environment. What has been produced is a reimagining of photography from its material conception to its dissemination (Hewitt, 2025b). Before I can conjure up that larger picture, I want to describe how these first images came about, and the lasting impression they have left on me.

'Thick time' and the origins of a collaborative relationship with the forest

Without any spare time to give to a time-sensitive medium, Hewitt found a way through by tuning into the lessons of the books she was reading (Hewitt, 2025a). Titles like Braiding Sweetgrass, The Hidden Lives of Trees, Finding the Mother Tree, and so many more that were part of a concurrence of ecological output at the beginning of this decade. She entered into a long-term collaboration with the trees, asking them to hold the camera for her while she explored new territory at home. The time that passed and is painted into these images is filled with uncertainty: life as a new mother, the shifting world under lockdown and the pre-existing and unanswered crises of loneliness and ecological collapse. What happens when we can look at all of that time, and all of the uncertainty that blew through it, on a single sheet of film?

Figure 1- Clare Hewitt ©, Pinhole camera long exposure, 2020-24, from the series Everything in the forest is the forest

In some cases, things break down (fig 1). The film itself, left for longer than intended as a result of the fluctuations of the pandemic, eventually succumbed to the effects of moisture. The outcomes are touched by this to various degrees. A few surface images are lost completely but what remains is a picture nonetheless: an abstract portrait of a shared vulnerability to time. The way in which Covid lockdowns collapsed and fractured our time was as difficult for the film to survive as it was for all of us. We are all in need of clarity as we move past the climax of one crisis but remain on course for another, much more comprehensive, disaster (Steffen, 2007, 614; Marsh, 1885, 29). In finding an external and reduced form for a time of crisis to sit within, Hewitt creates an opportunity for necessary reflection. What these images lack in literal vision, they gain in artistic clarity. “No matter how brilliant the day, if we lack the formative, artistic power of imagination, we become blind, both figuratively and literally. We need a light within as well as daylight without for vision: poetic or scientific, sublime or common.” (Zajonc, 1993,12). These lost long-exposures depict the capacity that instability has to corrode our livelihoods. By solidifying this transient collective experience into a single enduring form, perhaps we will not move on from it so flippantly.

Figure 2 - Clare Hewitt ©, Pinhole camera long exposure, 2020-24, from the series Everything in the forest is the forest

Where the surface image has survived, something impossibly luminous has been captured. A brushstroke of many suns paints the sky. It is an image thick with time, to borrow a phrase from Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker, depicting "a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible.” (Neimanis & Walker, 2014, 558). Hewitt achieves this reimagining by bringing human instruments into contact with the stature and the stillness of the trees, without which we could never witness such a patient view. In bringing our two timescales together onto one sheet of film, it becomes, like the Parthenon Freize, a precious incidence where humans can be pictured alongside larger planetary forces (Szerszynski, 2017, 113). It is a visualisation of the scale on which we exert our collective influence and a reminder of the responsibility that we should bear as a result (Ginn, 2018, 214). We exist in a planetary age, the Anthropocene, which is defined by the whims of humanity (Steffen, 2007, 614; Vernadsky, 1945, 5). These surviving images provide a complex picture of how humanity’s grounded vulnerability intertwines with a limitless potential to transform the world.

Within the image there is also an invitation to expand how we position ourselves within time, in order to project our actions "beyond the horizon of the present” (Grosz 2012, 46). In melding the boundaries of sunrises and sunsets, temporal constructs that are so archetypical to humans and to the medium of photography, Hewitt is challenging the audience to step outside our own small orbit. The knowledge that what is framed in this image is both entirely real and also impossible for a human to witness in the natural sequence of our lives, is transformative. It brings awareness to our limitations and allows for the appreciation of nature- of trees- as possessing a "timefulness" that we are desperately in need of (Bjornerud, 2020, 5). According to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, "time denial [is] rooted in a very human combination of vanity and existential dread" (Bjornerud, 2020, 7). In Hewitt's humbled application of the medium, trees are not just a material resource, as they would often be encountered, but are an essential collaborator. In relying on a "more-than-human" perspective (Szerszynski, 2022), this image visualises a time-blindness in our species that accompanies our short-sighted attitudes towards nature and the ecological crisis we are enduring.

I want to return for a moment to the pressures and limitations that existed at the foundation of the work. The unimaginable strain of motherhood, all the while surviving in an industry that is already unforgiving and has been hit by severing restrictions through the pandemic. On top of this, there is the new perspective that motherhood must bring with the literal embodiment of a future within you; the awareness that the weight your actions carry will land on the person you have been carrying. This personal context can bring home the reason why we need to address the ecological crisis and why work, like this, that finds creative ways to make the crisis digestible to an audience, is a vital necessity. Through an admission of weakness, Hewitt created the conditions for reciprocity (Kimmerer, 2013,190). For a civilisation caught oscillating between our infinite collective influence and our infinitesimal individual presence (Ginn, 2018, 214), reciprocity is a hopeful model for how we could define ourselves in relation to nature. We are all big enough to make an impact and important enough for the forest to need our attention. But we are also vulnerable and limited, such that we need, at times, to look to the larger forces within the forest for their guidance (Kimmerer, 2013, 9).

An Altered Forest: Photography Inside a Future Climate

Figure 3 - Clare Hewitt ©, The Peace Tree, 2020-24, from the series Everything in the forest is the forest

There is more to this forest (fig 3) than meets the eye. It exists in an altered state that verges on science fiction, and offers an insight into why, and how, Hewitt has produced such a comprehensive body of work out of her time in the forest. Through the work of The Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), Hewitt's 12 oak-tree collaborators are simultaneously undergoing an experiment that is bending the branches of time to give humanity a direct look into our future. They exist in a simulated environment, one constructed to meet the standards of air quality that are predicted of the year 2050 (University of Birmingham, 2025). Hewitt was invited into this space as an artist, to situate her practice amongst the trees and examine the collaborative way in which these organisms survive their unique situation (Mahtani & Hewitt, 2025).

The emotional territory being navigated through this thirty-year leap is uncharted. Each time Hewitt stepped through the temporal seal surrounding these trees, she did so with the burden of being one of the only humans with the tools to disseminate its portentous potential beyond the small circle of scientists currently engaging with this environment. She moved her artist's studio into the forest to conform to the boundaries set by the institute that she should remove nothing from, and leave no trace in, the landscape (Mahtani & Hewitt, 2025). The body of work Hewitt returned with deftly balances a scientific meticulousness with an intimacy and soulfulness that reflects her as both an artist and a human being.

To meet this temporally and emotionally swelled landscape, Hewitt has re-imagined the medium of photography from conception through to dissemination (Hewitt, 2025b). To clarify what this encompasses and what impact it can have, it is necessary to consider a few more individual instances, before approaching what the exhibition achieves in whole. What we encounter on each wall is expansive and experimental, but grounded in a question that is being consistently posed: If oak trees are capable of engaging with and transforming our future, what can we learn from them?

Soil, Humus and the Visible Underworld

Figure 4 - Clare Hewitt ©, Soil Chromatographs, 2024-25, from the series Everything in the forest is the forest

There are a series of soil chromatographs (fig 4) presented as a part of Everything in the forest is the forest's touring exhibition. The gallery text dangles the word 'humic' beneath the display, a term for the soil which shares its root in Latin with 'human' (Rozzi, 2023, 314). From a recognition of this connection, Hewitt has transformed a scientific methodology into an evocative display of our grounded origins. Through bringing these small-scale experiments into the context of an art gallery, lifting them to eye-height and above, the lost knowledge of our entanglement with the earth is gifted an approachable form. It is a humbling and grounding reminder that "we humans are humus that have forgotten our biospheric connections” (Rozzi, 2023, 315).

In this series, what could be diminished as the ground beneath our feet is rendered as a beautiful and complex organism. Hewitt's precious treatment of the soil echoes Ladelle McWhorter's eco-feminist reinterpretation of 'dirt', “Whatever discreteness, integrity, and identity living things may have, it all comes from the activity of that undifferentiated, much maligned stuﬀ we call dirt” (McWhorter, 1999, 167). Through the delicate display of the paper rings, we are invited to show care and pay attention to the animacy that exists in every spec of the natural world. With the support of the gallery text to communicate a place for humans within this context, we are encouraged to extend that care into our engagement with each other, and ourselves.

Figure 5 - Clare Hewitt ©, Root Panoramas, 2022-24, from the series Everything in the forest is the forest

Having transplanted the animacy of the earth onto the gallery wall in one series, Hewitt inverts the dynamic in another, by transporting the viewer directly into the matrix of the soil. What we encounter in this photograph (fig 5), is a hidden network of intimacy that enriches the circulation of life above ground. This visualisation of the 'wood-wide-web' (Wohlleben, 2016, 9), a fascinating subterranean network of mycorrhizal fungi through which the trees above can communicate and circulate nutrients (Simard, 2021, 5), is a rare instance in which an artist, not a scientist, has operated the specialised imaging technology required to produce it. Touched by reports of loneliness and isolation in the communities surrounding the forest, the artist was motivated to make this concealed structure of care visible (Hewitt, 2025a). What is produced is a nuanced vision, one that simultaneously inspires hope for more interactive society and unsettles our pre-existing attitudes towards connection. Distant from the illusion of individuality that we carry above ground, these revelations from below make it clear that we have to be truly selfless if we want to be held within an affirming unity.

It is not just the image of a network such as this, but the act of journeying beneath the earth to create it, that offers a model for how to become more deeply connected within our ecosystem. What is required, and exemplified by Hewitt's process, is a descent into discomfort. There is a tonal shift in this series to a darker palette, that compels this sense of uneasiness. The heaviness and uncertainty held within this darkness imbue the work with the power to provoke. It is a series that counterbalances other, lighter, interactions within Everything in the forest is the forest. This is a necessity, after all, how could the title suggest such a holistic exploration, if it did not venture into the obscure but deeply influential territory beneath the forest floor. Through a sensitivity to where this landscape has the capacity to challenge as well as affirm us Hewitt constructs a "provocation to think otherwise, to become otherwise” (Grosz, 2010, 52).

As with any application of this fundamentally extractive medium (Durham University, 2023), there is a cost to what is produced in these images. To see through the microscopic lens of the minirhizotron camera required a series of plastic tubes to be inserted into the soil. Hewitt anguished over whether the photographs were worth making this "incision" (Hewitt, 2025c). The simple fact of taking this seriously, as an incision, evokes the floor beneath the trees, and the entire world, as a body, rather than a cold assemblage of material. The animate landscape we encounter through Hewitt's careful guidance is completely unlike the disassembled material form in which photography generally meets the forest. It is this ethical framework of consideration, a thread which runs through and stitches the diverse portfolio of work together, which has the most to teach us about how to transform our engagement with nature.

The Exhibition as Ecological Microcosm

Figure 6 - Clare Hewitt ©, Installation Shot for Everything in the forest is the forest

If we want to transform our relationship with nature, entering into the exhibition of Everything in the forest is the forest is the place to start. It offers up a plethora of different levels on which you can find a deeper and more empathetic engagement with the earth. For me, it was the existential outlook of the solargraph (fig1) that I could situate myself within. But for others it could be any element of the expansive portfolio of tests that have not been touched on. From the kaleidoscopic display of oak-leaf lumen prints, to the anthropomorphic scans of germinating acorns and the peace tree encountered across seasons, there is a variety that exists in the work that enables it to impact a vast array of people. Taken as a microcosm, the way we meet the work, as we walk around this exhibition could transform the way in which we walk around and interact with the earth. What it is that draws us into a particular image or installation may be a precise representation of what we need to seek out in the natural world, in order to deepen our sense of reciprocity with it.

Successfully transplanting the animacy of the forest onto the white walls of a gallery required a tenderness and resilience which could not let up from conception to dissemination. The evocative power of Hewitt's ethical considerations makes it clear that we need artists, alongside the scientists that typically operate at this frontier, to inspire a personal response to ecological collapse. Throughout the exhibition she shows evidence of cooperation with the tools of science, through clear visual representations like the chromatographs and minirhizotron images, and more broadly through an attitude of meticulous inspection and observation. But this methodical side to the project is held in balance with the playful and empathetic energy at the core of Hewitt's artistic practice. We see this throughout the tenderly constructed exhibition, especially with the inclusion of materials from countless collaborative workshops delivered across the 5-year production of the work. The converging of art and science that is brokered by Hewitt throughout the exhibition is essential to bringing potentially transformative scientific insights out of small circles of academic distribution (Schneider, 2014, 10) into a widely accessible, and compellingly beautiful, form.

When she engages with the forest, Hewitt consistently does so not as an independent observer, but as an inseparable part of what is being recorded. This does not just result in an expansion of the scientific discipline and the photographic medium, but also the artistic context she is operating in. Much of the work is presented in frames that have been repurposed from previous exhibitions, a point that is noted in the gallery text for these installations. Where an exhibition might have the tendency to sit on the surface of the gallery environment in a pretend state of permanence, this choice and inclusion make it clear that, although significant, the exhibition is only a transient part of a cycle of construction and deconstruction that will soon give way to new forms.

Conclusion: Acting as if the Future Matters

The care and warmth that are demonstrated in this work puts into perspective how cold our behaviour around nature can be. As individuals, as a photographic industry, and as a society, our inconsideration runs so deep it is difficult to measure. Collectively, we are destroying the globe. The problem is that, like the monotonous voice of a whole football stadium heard from a distance, this mass effect is not representative of our beliefs as individuals. The vast majority of people do care about the planet (Ipsos, 2025). At a minimum, I imagine everybody reading this would care that the planet is going to stick around, in its current shape, for a few more generations. To achieve even this, we have to find a way to disassemble the immense crisis that exists on the horizon, to pull it apart piece by piece into the present, and into our daily interactions with, and consideration of, the earth.

Everything in the Forest is the Forest tackles every step apart from the final one. It disseminates the holistic energy of the forest into beautiful fragments. Each embodies a future that is possible but requires many things from us: presence, attention, care, energy, resilience, stamina, stability, and, most of all, hope. Throughout the process, Hewitt has already shown us what it means to embody these traits. All that is left to do is to act as if we believe in the future that lies dormant and expectant at the heart of this unimaginably beautiful and complex body of work.

Bibliography

Bjornerud, M. (2020) Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Durham University. (2023). Visuality and Extraction: Abstracts and Participant Biographies. Durham: Centre for Visual Arts and Culture. Available from: https://www.durham.ac.uk/media/durham-university/research-/research-centres/visual-arts-and-cultures-centre-for-cvac/VISUALITY-AND-EXTRACTION-abstracts-and-speaker-biographies.pdf[Accessed: 10.12.25]

Ginn, F. et al. (2018), Unexpected encounters with Deep Time. Environmental Humanities, vol. 10, no. 1, 213-225. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385534 [Accessed: 20.11.25]

Groarke, JM. et al. (2020) Loneliness in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional results from the COVID-19 Psychological Wellbeing Study. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239698 [Accessed 10.12.25]

Hewitt, C. (2024) Interview with AnnaRose Goldwitz. Musee Magazine. Available from: https://museemagazine.com/culture/2024/6/19/clare-hewitt-everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest [Accessed 10.11.25]

Hewitt, C. (2025a) Research Is Everywhere. BA Photography [online]. Available from: https://uwe.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=54c70d69-d879-43be-9966-b36b00d92fb5 [Accessed 10.10.25]

Hewitt, C. (2025b) Artist Statement: Everything in the Forest is the Forest [online]. [Accessed: 1.11.25]

Hewitt, C. (2025c) Conversation with Tess Foley

Impressions Gallery. (2025) Event: Everything in the forest is the forest. Available at: https://www.impressions-gallery.com/event/everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest/ [accessed 10.12.25]

Ipsos, 2025. People and Climate Change: Global public opinion survey. [online] Available at: https://www.ipsos.com/en/people-and-climate-change [Accessed 10.12.2025]

Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Mahtani, A & Hewitt, C (2025) Everything in the forest is the forest. Available at: https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest/ [Accessed 10.12.25]

Marsh G P. (1885) The Earth as Modified by Human Action [online]. eBook #6019. Available from; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6019/pg6019-images.html [Accessed: 20.11.25]

Neimanis, A. et. al (2014) Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality. Hypatia 29 (3), 558-575. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12064 [Accessed on 20.11.12]

Roe, Epha J. (2025) Photographic Phytography: Towards a Photographic Re-Centring of the Oak Tree within Theory, Material and Practice [online]. PhD, University of Brighton. Available from: https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63845494909727 [Accessed 10.11.12]

Rozzi, R. (2023) Humans Are Humus: An Analysis of Boff’s Panentheistic Ecotheology in the Framework of the Biocultural Ethic. Pantheism and Ecology, 313-329. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375658429_Humans_Are_Humus_An_Analysis_of_Boff's_Panentheistic_Ecotheology_in_the_Framework_of_the_Biocultural_Ethic [Accessed 10.11.25]

Schneider, B., & Nocke, T. (2014). Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv371c7dv [Accessed 10.11.25]

Simard, S. (2021). Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. London: Allen Lane (Penguin Books)

Steffen, W. et al. (2007). The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature [online]. Ambio 36(8), 614–621. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25547826 [Accessed: 20.11.25]

Szerszynski, B. (2017). The Anthropocene Monument: On Relating Geological and Human Time. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 111–31. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431016666087 [Accessed 20.11.12]

Szerszynski, B. (2022). Infrastructuring as a Planetary Phenomenon: Timescale Separation and Causal Closure in More-Than-Human Systems, Historical Social Research, 47 (4), 193-214. Available from: https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.47.2022.44 [Accessed 20.11.12]

University of Birmingham (2025). BIFoR FACE. Available from: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/birmingham-institute-of-forest-research/bifor-face [Accessed on: 25.11.25]

Vernadsky, V I. (1945). The Biosphere and the Noosphere. American Scientist, vol. 33, 1–12.

Wohlleben, P. (2016). The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World. Greystone Books (English translation).

Zajonc, A. (1993). Catching the Light: the entwined history of light and mind. London: Bantam Press

back