Maggie Hodge

Fragmentation, 2004

Scientist In Residence, Hiram College Biology Department

I am a biologist, studying spiders on the forest floor. This seems like a rather esoteric topic, but I am interested in the role these spiders play in the cycling of energy harnessed by the leaves of the trees into various other organisms in the forest. When these leaves drop to the ground in the autumn, the process of decomposition releases energy and nutrients. Some of the critters at the base of this "decomposition food web" are eaten by spiders, which in turn are eaten by salamanders, birds, insects, and even other spiders. These feeding relationships begin a transfer of the energy of the sun originally captured by the forest canopy back into the larger food web of the forest

When we started thinking about The Forest Project, one of the themes that most appealed to me was "the nature of place". I wanted to depict the forest in a series that illustrated varying levels of scale, from a broad view of entire forest canopy down to the miniature world of the creatures living in the leaf litter. Starting with the broadest perspective, the forest canopy and where it exists in the surrounding environment, I used an aerial photograph of the area and digitized it. I then transferred this image into a program that translated each pixel into a stitch in a needlepoint pattern. I have call this work "Fragmentation" because it shows how our forest is merely a fragment of its former range, surrounded by a sea of agriculture and development. I hope this piece conveys a greater sense of appreciation for how special the forest at the J.H. Barrow Field Station really is. In my future work I plan on a series of needlework and ceramics that focus on levels of scale moving from the canopy down to the wondrous biodiversity of the forest floor.