Shelley Jacobson: Sea of Trees

In Sea of Trees, the Japanese suicide landmark Aokigahara-jukai is perceived as a place of social construction. The forest boundary signifies a contrast between social norms and the everyday, with social marginalisation and the horrific.

In process, the work sought a consciously systematic approach, involving photography at set distances apart on two walks, creating photographic paths along a margin of the forest and within it. The tiles of the works include fragments derived from web searches in Japanese, exploiting a somewhat fraught online 'translate' function. This produced text that is removed and partial, with an interest in the circulation and skew of information.

sea of trees was undertaken in response to existing representations of Aokigahara-jukai. These commonly sensationalist depictions have arguably encouraged further suicidal ideation in relation to the site. This body of work explores another kind of photography, forming links between social marginalisation of both the site and the issue of suicide.

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