Ellie Davies’s Forest Photography: Landscape as an Artistic Setting

A pale band crosses the space between tree trunks. Small rounded structures gather on a forest floor. Elsewhere, a woodland seems to contain a sky full of stars. Ellie Davies’s photographs invite you into recognisable landscapes, then introduce something that makes you look again.

Davies has worked in UK forests since 2007, according to her artist statement. Her practice explores the meeting point between the physical woodland and the meanings people bring to it: stories, memories, unease and a sense of belonging.

Between the Trees: making the space visible

In Between the Trees, 2014, smoke drifts through the forest interior. It makes the spaces between trunks feel tangible, giving your eye a line to follow through a scene that might otherwise be read mainly as trees and ground.

Look at the contrast between the vertical trunks and the lighter horizontal band. The image holds both a stable structure and a passing event. That tension gives an apparently quiet woodland a sense of movement and time.

The smoke belongs to the artistic intervention. Understanding that choice adds another layer to the photograph: you are seeing a landscape and the artist’s temporary mark within it.

The Dwellings: forms that suggest shelter

The Dwellings, 2012 uses materials gathered from the forest floor to create small structures. Their shapes can suggest nests, shelters or miniature homes, while their textures connect them to the surrounding ground.

Davies describes returning to observe how the works changed over time. That makes their eventual weathering part of the project’s life, rather than simply damage to a finished object.

The selected photograph rewards close looking. Notice the edges of the forms and how quickly they begin to merge with the woodland around them. The ambiguity is productive: the structures look both placed and almost at home.

Stars: bringing two kinds of distance together

For Stars, 2014–2015, Davies combined forest photographs with astronomical imagery associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. The points of light are part of a composite artwork, not stars physically visible between the nearby branches.

The result joins an enclosed, walkable space with the vast distance implied by a night sky. Try following the image first as woodland, then as a field of light. Your sense of depth may change even though the frame remains still.

A woodland walk inspired by the photographs

These images are artworks rather than a map to permanent attractions waiting along a public trail. Davies describes her interventions as temporary and non-invasive; the finished photograph is central to how the work reaches viewers.

You can borrow the habit of attention without adding anything to a forest. On your next walk, notice one gap between trees, one repeated shape and one patch of changing light. Our woodland-walk comparison offers several settings for that kind of unhurried looking.

For another artist’s transformation of a familiar landscape, explore Lucid Stead. A change in framing or material can make an ordinary-looking place feel newly unfamiliar—and worth a second glance.

The forest is part of the construction

Davies’s work introduces or combines elements with woodland scenes to examine how people imagine and relate to landscape. The photographs should therefore be read as artworks, not as evidence that every glowing point, line or unusual form occurs naturally in a forest.

The original feature described several years of work, but seven years was a duration attached to that publication period. It is not a current measure of the artist’s whole career.

Look for the intervention

Begin with the ordinary structure of the scene: trunks, undergrowth, paths and the distance between trees. Then identify the element that interrupts or redirects that reading. The tension between the familiar setting and the added visual idea is often where the photograph becomes most interesting.

The three series offer different ways to reconsider the same broad subject. Smoke makes a passing presence visible between trunks; small built forms suggest occupation at ground level; astronomical imagery introduces a distance no woodland path can reach. Looking at them together gives Davies’s work more range than a general description of enchanted forest pictures. The forest is recognisable in each, but the added element changes what kind of space it seems to be. That shift is a rewarding thing to notice on returning to an image after the first surprise has passed.