For Golden Forest, I traveled through the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. I wanted to experience the forest firsthand and see what lay beyond the images and ideas I had associated with it.

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Being there was intense. The heat, humidity, and sheer density of the vegetation shaped every part of the experience. At the same time, I was struck by the extraordinary diversity and complexity of the forest. So much remained out of sight, and perhaps that was one of the strongest impressions I took away from the journey: the sense of being surrounded by an immense eco system that could never be fully grasped.

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But I also kept encountering areas where the forest had been cleared for roads and agriculture. The longer I stayed, the more apparent the contrast became between the richness of this ecosystem and the speed at which it was being transformed.

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When I returned to my studio, I began thinking about how that contradiction could become part of the work itself.

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I covered wooden panels with 24-karat gold leaf and printed the photographs using charcoal briquettes that I had ground into a fine powder. The gold formed the background, while the charcoal formed the image.

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Gold carries associations of wealth, prosperity, and material value. Charcoal, by contrast, begins as plant matter and ends as a consumable material. Bringing the two together allowed the image of the forest to sit between two very different ideas of value.

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For me, the tension in these works lies in the relationship between these materials: the forest as a place of extraordinary richness, and the economic idea of richness that contributes to its transformation.