Olivia Badoi

Walking among a series of prints by the American wood engraver Lynd Ward (1905–85), Art Spiegelman was surprised to find himself transported from a chic Binghamton art gallery into a primordial forest. Though he had not left the gallery, Spiegelman was surrounded by networks of branches, trees, and woods reaching out at him from the prints on the wall. Within this gallery-turned-forest, Spiegelman gained a new appreciation of the power of Ward’s arboreal aesthetic. Singling out a particularly noteworthy print, Spiegelman describes “a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.” The print he describes, Pathfinder , is striking for its disorientation. The “treescape” evokes a sense of kinetic energy and of light within darkness. Trees fracture the perspective of the print as they partially block the human figure. The forest in Pathfinder is disorienting, tree branches are both barriers and bridges on the young man’s journey. Such disorientation is reinforced by the seemingly impossible perspective of the print. At once, viewers are positioned beside the young man, looking at him through the trees in the foreground, and on the forest floor, looking up at the canopy in the background. Ward uses an overabundance of trees to challenge viewers to reimagine their relationship with the natural world.

There is always some degree of confusion when I tell people that I am getting my PhD in English by writing a dissertation about wordless novels. While I’m used to giving my “elevator pitch” to fellow academics, describing my project to people outside of academia can be more of a challenge: