Andrew O'Brien. Stringer's Ridge.

A forest with no horizon

Stringer's Ridge is a wooded area in the United States where honeysuckle has grown over almost everything. The two most common species are Japanese honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica, and Amur honeysuckle, Lonicera maackii. Both were brought to the US in the early nineteenth century, planted as ornamentals and to hold soil against erosion. Then they spread beyond every plan and became invasive.

Andrew O'Brien is an artist who works with how physical space is organised, especially landscape and the built environment. He makes experimental publications, photographs, video and installations. He was a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellow in 2021, taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga from 2014 to 2024, and now lives in Austin, Texas.

The exhibition Stringer's Ridge ran at IAO Gallery, Los Angeles, from 8 February to 7 March 2025. Its question is simple and hard: how do you look at a landscape so dense it has no horizon, one that refuses to sit still inside a frame?

Enfleurage as film development

To keep the smell of honeysuckle, O'Brien used enfleurage. Special frames are built and coated with a semi solid fat. Fresh flowers are laid on top. The fat draws in the aromatic compounds. Spent flowers are removed and replaced with a new round.

O'Brien calls each round of flowers an exposure. The fat, in this view, is a sensitised film. It waits, and keeps whatever touches it.

The comparison is more than a nice image. It touches a core idea of analogue photography: a photograph is a physical trace of what stood before the lens. Real light fell on real film. The smell in the fat frame is the same. Not a simulated smell. The smell of the very flowers that lay there, day after day.

There is one difference. A photograph keeps a moment. The fat frame keeps a sequence of moments laid over one another, many rounds of flowers, many mornings. It is closer to a multiple exposure than to a snapshot.

In the gallery

The installation brings together three kinds of object. Synthetic tree trunks wrapped in honeysuckle vines and carrying honeysuckle aromatics. Enfleurage frames holding the collected smell. And photographs of the forest understory, overlaid with survey and wayfinding marks.

The trunks are fake. The vines and the smell come from the real forest. The mismatch is deliberate. The exhibition describes itself as a study of the limits of replication, the logic of extraction, and the Western habit of understanding nature: measure it, separate it, carry it back to a room.

The survey marks make this plain. They are the language of someone who wants to master land: coordinates, arrows, lines. Laid over a thick wall of leaves, they look helpless. The forest does not answer in maps.

The value of not knowing everything

Stringer's Ridge does not try to solve the forest. It finds value in indeterminacy, in a complexity that cannot be fully known. That is a rare choice in landscape art, which tends to build a fine viewpoint and a clear horizon.

Smell suits that choice. Smell has no frame. It has no foreground or background. It arrives from every side at once, like the understory closing around someone on foot.

The approach recalls another work that rebuilt the smell of flowers from traces, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg's Resurrecting the Sublime. There the flowers were extinct. Here there are too many. Two poles of one question: what do people leave on a landscape, and what does a landscape leave in our nose.