Inessa Saarits “Engraved Forests”
Inessa Saarits’s new series of blind embossings forms a map of bark beetle damage in selected Estonian forests.
Over the course of a year, the artist has collected pieces of tree bark and developed a method for transferring the intricate beetle trails onto paper.
While bark beetles play a vital role in forest ecosystems as decomposers, their populations have surged due to unusually warm recent summers—allowing them to reproduce up to three generations in a single season instead of one. This accelerated activity has placed spruce trees under severe threat of extinction.
The resulting blind embossings reveal the delicate, labyrinthine markings of various beetle species—while simultaneously bearing witness to the death of the trees from which they were printed.
Inessa Saarits explores the intersections of art and biology in her practice.
She is drawn to natural and time-sensitive materials and investigates the world around her through the lens of a microscope. Saarits holds a degree in installation and sculpture from the Estonian Academy of Arts and has furthered her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
She is a member of ENKKL (Estonian Young Contemporary Artists’ Association) and the collective TEMA, and one of the founding members of the youth art initiative Kunstikompott.
