LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Elizabeth Wiese: Arborescence by Aline SmithsonJuly 14, 2026

©Elizabeth Wiese, Farouche, 2025 (Self portrait, multiple exposure with oak and greenbriar, Duxbury, MA)

I recently had the great pleasure to experience the Atelier 40 Exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography. One of the artists included in the exhibition was Elizabeth Wiese, who presented a wonderful installation of images that spoke to our connection to the natural world. In her project, Arborescence, the forest becomes both collaborator and mirror. Through l landscapes, self-portraiture, and multiple exposures, the artist explores the intimate relationship between body and place, revealing how memory, identity, and the natural world become intertwined over a lifetime. Trees are not simply subjects to be photographed, but living companions whose forms echo the cycles of a human life. Moving between observation and participation, Arborescence considers the ways we are rooted in the landscapes that shape us, and how, in moments of quiet attention, the boundaries between ourselves and nature begin to dissolve.

©Elizabeth Wiese, Cambré, 2025 (Flexible maple, town forest Duxbury, MA)

Elizabeth Wiese is a conceptual photographer whose work combines elements of the landscape with self portraiture, using multiple exposure to highlight the connection between nature and human experience. Her lifelong study of classical ballet and childhood among the trees at her family’s nursery heavily influence her evocative images which express strength, fragility, movement and grace.

Wiese’s photographs have been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA), Panopticon Gallery (Boston, MA), Photographic Resource Center (PRC, Cambridge, MA), Anne Henning Gallery (Duxbury, MA), the Curated Fridge (Somerville, MA), A Smith Gallery (online), and Photoplace Gallery (Middlebury, VT) where she has twice received Juror’s Award for her submissions. She was selected for the PRC Exposure exhibition in 2024.

Wiese has a BA in Economics from Colby College, studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and Paris, and taken numerous photography workshops through Maine Media Workshops, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Santa Fe Workshops and the Griffin Museum of Photography where she recently completed the Atelier program.

She lives and works in Duxbury, MA where she spends a lot of time walking in the woods.

Instagram: @wiesebeth

©Elizabeth Wiese, Woodcut, 2025 (Self portrait, multiple exposure with maple, Duxbury, MA)

Arborescence

Trees have always been in my DNA. From the solid oaks that surrounded my childhood home, to the burlap-bound evergreens at my family’s nursery, to the sunlit cedar grove at my current home, each is part of me. Walking in the woods is a visceral experience, I see my life unfold with each turn of the path. Needles shed from mature pines enrich the saplings below. A current of vines electrifies and inspires a single tree. A copse of uniquely branching deciduous trees shines together in the complexity that surrounds it.

Arborescence is my photographic dance through the forest exploring identity, place, and memory. At times I am audience, expressed with singular landscape images that evoke personal experience. At times I am partner, using self portraiture and multiple exposure to weave our fibers together, embracing the concept of “being” nature.

As a lifelong dancer, I see myself in the trees. Their branches are port de bras and arabesques, their roots a balanced, solid base. Twisted, tangled trunks and vines remind me of my own crooked path through life, and veins in a leaf are wrinkles beginning to appear on my own face. Our spirits combine on the ground we share, and if only for a moment, we dance.