Last Tuesday and Wednesday, whether you were headed to Sharples for dinner or ran past Parrish on your way to an evening class, you may have noticed some of the tall oak trees … glowing? Arborlight, a two-night outdoor projection series by artist and Swarthmore Alum Meredith Leich ’08, explores how we can visualize, understand, and connect with the nature that surrounds us. Combining art and science, Leich’s projects address the unsettling reality of climate change in beautiful pieces of interactive art. Some of her previous work includes Animated Drawings for a Glacier, At the Currents’ Edge, and The Mothership.
Arborlight began as an investigation of how we come to understand climate change. Unable to fully grasp the effects of rising temperatures on us individually and globally, Leich embarked on a two-week trip to Alaska in the summer of 2018. While there, she witnessed the national parks’ treasures — the glaciers, which led her to lean into her background as an Art History major and self-taught 3D animator.
Attempting to capture her experience, she painted the landscape onto watercolor paper, and highlighted the dark layers and twisting ridges that ran through the ice. She then translated these lines into charcoal sketches, taking incremental photos to mimic a stop-motion animation. These photos laid the foundation for her work. After the trip, Leich wanted to focus on glacial layers, noting their significance as the main body of these massive structures. The following summer, she returned to Alaska, experimenting with projections of her inverted drawing on smaller glaciers in the area. This project became known as “Animated Drawings for a Glacier.”
Wanting to develop her work further, she analyzed other kinds of layers found in nature: wind and ocean patterns in Iceland, ancient glacier erosion in Massachusetts, and tree rings in Virginia. After each projection, Leich learned more about the goals of these projects: How can we translate the climate crisis into digestible content? How do we make a statement that is powerful, but simultaneously subtle? What aspects of our environment can and should we protect?
Thus, Arborlight was born. Focusing on Swarthmore’s diverse arboretum, Leich created animations tailored to specific trees in the amphitheater and surrounding Parrish Hall. She wanted to depict the relationships trees have with their environment — connections with one another, plants, creatures, and people. Described by Leich on her website as “super-hosts,” the hand-drawn and digitized animations show the viewers the trees’ labor, from their development as saplings to towering oaks, to the movement of water and energy throughout their roots and trunks, and to the small creatures that make the branches home.
According to the project’s description, Leich notes, “In highlighting just a few of the campus’ oaks, I hope to draw into our awareness one of the many species that surround us.” After visiting both sites, I believe she drew her viewers into her intended vision. Wandering around the Scott Amphitheater and Magill Walk at dusk, I experienced Swarthmore’s nature from a new perspective. The highlighted trees stood out from the darkness, drawing my attention … We were in communication, two beings, taking in one another for the first time.
When I was alone, I stared at the animation, noticing the sharpness of the flurrying images and the fluidity of others. Hit with nostalgia, I remembered old animated cartoons and mystical stories from my childhood. Only after watching the videos several times, I could reflect on what I was seeing and feeling. The video’s pace seemed to mimic the time nature takes, achingly long in our lifetimes, yet a blink of our planet’s eyes in its lifetime.
Standing beneath the outstretched oak, I felt small, as a person and as a part of the human species. Despite our size and lifespan, we as a collective have managed (and continue) to cause so much harm. Our destruction started with an unlit match, and now has become a flame that we’ve fueled with gasoline, burning holes through our entire ecosystem.
Yet, there is still enough time to grab the extinguisher.
While I was staring at the trees, the community, filled with students, professors, friends, townsfolk, and strangers, surrounded my vision. Though perhaps not the intent of the project, Arborlight brought a diverse group of people together as one, collective observer. I saw students gazing up uninterrupted, professors admiring the quality of the work, and parents teaching their children the importance of sustainability.
Media, artwork, and political discourse on climate change tend to focus on its inevitability. Temperatures are rising and will continue to skyrocket because our fossil fuel emissions follow a similar trend. However, our generation is attempting to break the cycle. Taking in the projections, seeing parents teach their children, and reflecting on our damage, I thought of the community-focused, collective efforts making a substantive difference.
Campus Coalition Concerning Chester (C4) is a student-run environmental coalition supporting Chester Residents Concerned Over Quality Living (CRCQL). CRCQL aims to shut down the ReWorld, formerly known as “Covanta,” incinerator in Chester County and improve the quality of life within the densely populated, low-income, minority-majority community. According to the Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania, “38.5% of children in Chester, PA have asthma. [This data is] five times the national average.” As the largest trash incinerator in the United States, ReWorld’s, or Covanta’s, particulate air pollution has disproportionately affected the health of many Chester residents.
However, CRCQL has successfully reduced air pollution, and even became the first activist group to “apply the Civil Rights Act in an environmental racism lawsuit against the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 1996.” Additionally, CRCQL effectively closed Thermal Pure, the “nation’s largest medical waste autoclave.” C4 supports the group through alliances between local colleges, including the Tri-Co-Harvard College, Bryn Mawr College, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard College. Additionally, C4 promotes environmental justice work on campus, and throughout Pennsylvania.
According to their mission statement, C4 “hope[s] to interrogate our own college communities’ complicities and roles in [environmental] injustice and implement institutional-level solutions for equitable waste management.” The group mobilizes communities to raise awareness of environmental racism, fight for clean air in Chester County, and secure zero-waste commitments in all 49 municipalities of Delaware County. From the GAs who dedicate their time to grueling compost shifts to the dedicated student farmers who tend to Swarthmore’s Garden Collective and Good Food Garden, groundbreaking work is happening within, from, and around our community.
And, as Leich shows us, this work can start with something as ubiquitous as trees. Perhaps in their magnitude, they illustrate our triviality. During our short time on earth, Leich asks us to protect something so massive and yet fragile. She begs us to consider branches not as objects, but as limbs. Leich asks us to recognize the life that surrounds us as life – not inanimate objects to destroy. I looked around at the glowing trees and saw a distinct possibility: a world where trunks could refract light without absorbing it, one where bark knew light rather than fire.
Maybe the world is burning, but we don’t need to continue adding sparks. Arborlight reminds us to stop and confront the very nature we destroy. It asks us to live with it, experience it, and leave with it lingering in our minds. At the very least, Leich brings light to Scott’s Arboretum’s beauty and the fauna that breathes life into our campus. And, at most, the project forces us to look within, and question whether or not we’re doing enough to conserve it.
