Two abiding interests have shaped Prilla Smith Brackett's recent artwork, a fascination for the strength and mystery of forests and trees, and an appreciation of the role of place in forming and sustaining the thread of memory.

She was first awed by forest landscape in the Colombian jungle, along the Amazon, when she was visiting the family of her family's Colombian exchange student. The enormous buttresses of the towering trees and the tangled lianae captured her imagination. While at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe Brackett made mural sized black and white drawings. Later she was able to continue using rainforest images because of opportunities to draw and photograph in both Malagasy and Costa Rican jungles. Having grown up with parents who believed that we are on this earth to make it better, she wanted to draw attention to the plight of jungles, so the work began to have an environmental emphasis. Ultimately, needing to find forests closer to home, she took on a project in which she did a drawing a day for a year of natural outdoor subjects, and also began focusing on nordic northern forests. She found and hiked to pockets of old growth forest in northern New England to photograph. Drawings and paintings done in the studio became an exhibition which traveled to 8 locations. ”Remnants: Ancient Forests & City Trees.” she juxtaposed and fragmented urban and forest trees, suggesting the struggle between constraint and freedom, the conflict of the natural and man-made worlds.

Reflecting on this work, Brackett realized that perhaps her interests in trees came in part from childhood memories. Trees were an essential part of her relationship with her father. When her siblings were young, he bought wooded land with a stream and meadows outside West Hartford, CT. They camped out there, having adventures in the stream, learning about pit toilets, and helping make a lean-to on the top of the “mountain” with small trees he had felled. When he started planting tiny evergreens to start a tree farm, She remembers the pleasure of planting with him. He loved nurturing his trees and taking care of the land. Friends came at Christmas time to choose and cut trees, and haul them by toboggan up to their cars on the paved road, while a roaring fire and hot cider in the tiny farmhouse gave recent arrivals courage for the hunt.

Trees and family memories figure together in another body of recent prints and paintings. Brackett's maternal grandparents bought a rambling summer cottage on Duxbury Bay in 1915 , when her mother was a toddler. After housing many multi-generational gatherings, it became clear on her mother's death that Brackett's family could not afford keep it. She decided to discover, through artwork, what was important to her about the place. Of most interest was the sleeping porch, a second-story structure lined with windows looking out on trees and the bay. Seen from inside, outside, or from the breezy porch underneath it offered many opportunities for artistic exploration. The old hospital beds, put there by her grandmother for her children and used by Brackett's, were still there. She liked the way the angles of the windows, furniture, and exposed structure took one out into the landscape. Downstairs, views of the porch from inside often included a chair or a portion of a hammock. She liked how such glimpses of furniture suggested the recent presence of someone, someone who had just left, or someone from the distant past. The trees surrounding the porch seemed also to stand for family or friends from the past. And crazy as it might sound, she sometimes thought of the house and its immediate trees and surroundings as being one organism, a vital communion of the manmade and the natural projecting a feeling of loss, the incompleteness of memory, and the transience of time. Anxious that she might lose this rich source of image and emotion, she thoroughly photographed the house and its furniture, including the bed in which her mother was born, just before the family packed up the place in 2005.

Several years ago, when Brackett realized that she wanted to return to forest images, she thought of the old house on the bay and the furniture from earlier generations that had been such a part of her family's life. She wanted to put her two compelling interests together by placing transparent images of that furniture into a forest setting, juxtaposing the memory-charged domestic with the awe-inspiring natural. This body of work thus represents a kind of synthesis of many years of art-making, one that has much yet to offer..