Of Ash and Ice (White Forest) marks the origin of the Make-Believe Forest, an ongoing series that asks where childhood selves retreat during adulthood and whether they can be brought back. In this first forest, a resurrecting altar was built, and the material logic of return, preservation, and transformation first took shape.

In children's stories, the forest is often a site of transformation or trial. Here, it is an invented landscape built of many parts, as if staged for performance, play, or ritual. Teddy bears are frozen upside down and remade as decorative candles. Used food containers are carefully mosaicked over to preserve them and their food remnants. Throughout the installation, candle forms made from dry rigatoni and manicotti pasta, filled with wax and wick, spark the fantasy of return while also threatening inevitable collapse if lit. The forest warns that any return to the past also changes it, and that acts of preservation can consume what they try to save. ​

Ash and ice suggest aftermath, stillness, and the potential for change. Across the ground, small objects made from playground sand gather like relics, lost toys, or seeds. As the entry point to the series, White Forest introduces a space where ruin and imagination meet, and where the fantasy of return first takes hold. From this initial landscape, the forest has continued to grow through successive iterations, including Yellow Forest, Purple Forest, and Black Forest.