What They Breathe Out, We Breathe In
Elsewhere, illuminated root systems snake into the grass, tiny points of light skitter, bug-like, across another tree, and the serrated grooves of bark — jagged patterns formed over a century — are traced in light.
This is the first night of Arborlight, an immersive outdoor art installation by watercolorist, animator, and video artist Meredith Leich ’08.
Through shifting projections and subtle visual storytelling, Leich invites viewers into a layered experience of time: scientific time, emotional time, ecological time, and artistic time. She plays with the vastly different scales of each, inviting them all to converge here, briefly, in Swarthmore’s familiar nocturnal landscape.
“Knowing how the history of these trees runs parallel to the history of the College felt inspiring to me,” says Leich.
“When they first inaugurated the school, they planted trees, and it always puts things in perspective knowing that these trees saw several generations of human lives — they were around long before World War I — human events that seem so defining for us, but preceded us.”
While there, Leich met Vince Formica, associate professor of biology at Swarthmore, and their early conversations, which ranged from the intersection of art and research to the persistent challenges of securing funding for creative and scientific work, laid the groundwork for a shared vision.
That shared pursuit deepened during a field visit to an old-growth forest, where Leich encountered a massive fallen silver maple affectionately known by MLBS researchers as The Mothership.
On the surface of this decomposing tree live hundreds of forked fungus beetles, which, along with the tree itself, mutually contribute to the forest’s deep carbon cycle. Each summer, Formica and a group of Swarthmore students travel to MLBS to study how the social behaviors of this charismatic insect evolve across generations.
“They look like tiny triceratops,” says Leich, “and they have intricate mating rituals. The males fight with each other but also raise their young. Because they live for five or six years, you can come back and see the population over time. So they’re a great research subject. I was really intrigued.”
Inspired, Leich created an impromptu animation that she projected onto The Mothership.
“I got hours of beetle footage from the scientists’ research, then isolated the beetles, turning them into little white spots of light,” explains Leich. Wanting to explore the relationship of the insects, the ecosystem, and the human onlookers, Leich then combined this altered beetle footage with a video she made of the night sky, plus digital animations inspired by tree vasculature and spores. “It was a tribute to the tree, the beetles that were there, and the scientists,” says Leich.
“We just stood there, staring at it,” Formica recalls. “It was an emotional experience for me as a scientist, and to see that emotion reflected back by the artists was powerful.”
That moment sparked the idea for Arborlight.
With support from Swarthmore’s Cooper Foundation, Leich brought her vision to campus, using the campus’ heritage trees — specifically, oak and tulip trees — as inspiration. “We got over 200 people to stand outside in the cold, just to look at trees,” Formica said. “That’s an incredible achievement.”
“I’m interested in how our perception of time can be sped up and slowed down,” says Leich. “You see a tree that’s 200 years old, but how do you try to appreciate that?”
Leich studied art history and music at Swarthmore, but it wasn’t until her senior year that she began an earnest pursuit of visual art after Randall Exon, the Sara Lawrence Lightfoot Professor of Art, invited her into his senior studio class.
“He suggested that I try using watercolors,” recalls Leich. “It was his gentle way of saying, ‘You might like this.’
“I would go sit in the Kohlberg Coffee Bar and just look out at the campus and watch the light changing,” says Leich. “I painted the water tower behind the Science Center many, many times — in part, just because I liked how that spherical object took to shadow.
“There’s something about watching the visual environment change through time and through light that really stayed with me,” she says.
After Swarthmore, Leich attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her interest in close observation deepened alongside a new focus on Earth’s changing climate. She developed a multi-year collaboration with glaciologist Andrew Malone, which led to the creation of her self-described “docufantasy” film, Scaling Quelccaya. Using 3D animation and complex satellite imagery, the film reframes the rapid retreat of Quelccaya, the world’s largest tropical glacier, by superimposing its almost incomprehensible volume of ice atop a model of Chicago.
For Leich, Chicago became a “surreal measuring stick through which we can envision the glacier’s changing form and our changing world.”
“I walked on a glacier for the first time and heard all of these incredible sounds,” says Leich. “I felt the cold air coming off of the glacier.”
“It was incredibly physical, and I felt like I needed to turn what I’d been doing [in Chicago] on its head,” she adds. “So, instead of making a complex animation from a glacier, I wanted to make an animation for a glacier using the simplest technology I could think of.”
With paper, charcoal, and a free stop-motion app on her phone, Leich sketched images of the glacier from a nearby cabin. She used these drawings to create an animation that depicted the glacier’s slow retreat, and then projected the animation onto the glacier itself.
In her account of the experience, Leich writes, “In the 10 p.m. Alaskan twilight, I hiked with a small audience to project the animated drawings onto glacial ice, with just a battery-powered projector, tripod, and a cell phone for my theater. I considered these illuminated acts an opportunity to tell the story of the glacier back to itself. My intention was to keep the process unintrusive to the landscape, while shedding light on the tremendous past and future power of the glacier to shape and reform the world we have known.”
“In the early days of climate research, scientists thought data would be enough,” Formica says. “But we’ve learned that people need to feel something. That’s where artists come in. They help us tell the story in a way that resonates.”
At a moment when the world feels increasingly fractured, Arborlight reminds us that it’s still possible to feel connected to our environment and our ecology — and, by extension, to each other. With close enough observation, we can even witness the nearly imperceptible motions and daily rhythms of trees — ordinary but extraordinary living things that bear witness to human history while shouldering the tremendous task of sustaining human life.
“They are the exhale to our inhale,” says Leich.“What they breathe out, we breathe in.”