Unquiet
Things

When I write about the artists whose work appears in my books, the focus is usually on showcasing the visual creations themselves. But with Forest Rogers, I find myself equally enchanted by her language. Her words cast spells – quite literally, if we consider Alan Moore’s insight that to spell is to manipulate words, to change consciousness. When Forest writes about “wrestling with devilkins” in her house “like a proper Baba Yaga hut,” or describes a pigeon dancing “a pure call to cast one’s very soul upon the waters,” her prose channels the same otherworldly quality as her sculptures.

Which presents me with a delightful challenge: how do I write about an artist who already expresses herself so beautifully? Forest’s mystical voice feels like incantations emerging from the same mythological realm as her creatures. But we’re going to try anyway, because her sculpture, The Beautiful Crustacean, graces the pages of The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That Is Unreal, and her work deserves deeper exploration.

One gets the sense that Forest Rogers is an artist who has experienced first-hand both the joy and despair of mermaids singing, has felt the euphoric, incandescent flutter of angel wings, held the literal hand of the dark night of the soul, and maybe even danced a tango with a prehistoric skeleton or a luminous beam of starlight. How else would this artist instinctively know how to sculpt the ineffable, the transcendent, the staggeringly unbelievable into such a graceful and dynamic reality?

These creatures, marvels of myth and imagination, monstrously beautiful and tinged with melancholy, seem poised at the verge, a frozen moment of fragile movement – as if they may at any moment take flight and disappear with their secrets into the mist, or skitter close and whisper mysterious revelations. Approach them with care, take only what is offered to you, and let the world go on, knowing that you have experienced a bit of the magic that made them.

Forest’s path to these mythological beings wasn’t direct. For 25 years, she created dinosaur sculptures for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, alongside an eclectic array of commercial projects, but her artistic vision was seeded much earlier. As a child, she spent hours sitting on her grandmother’s floor studying volumes illustrated by Rackham, Nielsen, and Dulac – “I think I’m now digging through the universe for my ideas, just as I was looking for treasure in this house,” she reflects on her blog.

Growing up as the daughter of visionary artist Lou Rogers, Forest learned that art could be both wound and healing, a lesson that infuses her current work. Her creative process now begins with morning observations at a coffee shop, watching pigeons dance while she sketches on tracing paper, contemplating the same subjects repeatedly until they reveal their essential nature. From these loose drawings, she builds each sculpture methodically – first the head to establish identity, then an armature wire framework, gradually filling out the creature until it achieves that ineffable moment of transformation.

This gift for capturing transformation reveals itself across her mythological menagerie. Night Bloom captures a creature suspended between violence and grace, its delicate bat ears framing a face of porcelain serenity even as it holds a moth caught mid-flight at its lips – a dainty dinner frozen in breathless moments before consumption.

The being’s coloring whispers of twilight’s most tender palette: cream and pale salmon, the palest of lilacs, like a sunset with the saturation washed out in the inside of a seashell. Yet for all its predatory purpose, the creature has taken root, its lower body flowing into a plant-like stem that suggests it belongs as much to the garden as to the night sky. Here is hunger made beautiful, the hunt transformed into ballet, a reminder that even the most essential acts of survival can be rendered with exquisite tenderness.

In Winter Siren, Forest presents us with a figure draped in the deepest winter’s palette – plum and midnight blue feathers that seem simultaneously cloak and natural plumage, rimed with a scrim of frost that catches light like captured starshine.

Her pale face gazes cool and quiet with devotion as she holds aloft a golden Venetian mask fashioned as a sunburst. “She holds a mask suggesting the Sun, ever eagerly awaited in the longest winter nights,” Forest explains, and in her gesture we witness the entire drama of seasonal faith – winter personified as keeper of summer’s promise, the siren who sings not of shipwreck but of spring’s eventual return.

Octopoid Descending embodies the elemental pull toward oceanic depths, her tentacles streaming upward as if caught in an invisible current. Rendered in cream and the softest coral shadows, she possesses an expression both serene and formidable – a being wholly of the sea drawn toward her natural element.

Her descent carries the weight of ancient purpose, guiding her toward realms where pressure and darkness hold their own terrible beauty. Her tentacles flow with liquid grace, yet carry the weight of inevitability, as if she bears messages meant only for the deepest trenches.

In Goblin Spider, Forest weaves together folktale and ukiyo-e tradition with her own dark humor – the spider perched as elaborate headdress while a mouse dangles from lips that once might have held silk fabric in classical prints. Where courtesans once conveyed coded desire through delicate tissue, the creature offers rodent prey with the same demure poise. T

The wordplay tickles the mischievous itch in my brain that delights in such things: from moth in mouth to mouse in mouth, Forest creates her own language of captured sustenance. The symmetry speaks to that eternal tension she loves – grace balanced against horror, beauty shadowed by predation, the spider maiden who watches with eyes both human and arachnid, equally capable of seduction and consumption.

Night Sphinx embodies the wistful contemplation of desert nights, her gaze turned skyward toward constellations only she can read. Rendered in blues softened by darkness and touched with subtle gold as if moonlight were burnishing her feathers, she perches upon her pedestal with the patient grace of one who has spent centuries watching the wheel of stars. Her expression carries that particular melancholy of nocturnal guardians – beings who know the secrets whispered between dusk and dawn.

A delicate winding stairway spirals around the base of her pedestal, leading to an entrance far too small for sphinx paws but perfectly sized for the tiny magician who dwells below. She stands sentinel not just over the desert night, but over an entire miniature realm where creatures of different scales share the same moonlit world.

Flemish Moth emerges from transformative slumber, her face blank with the serene stasis of a creature suspended between becoming and being. “Hatched from the Northern Renaissance,” she bears wings that crown her head like an elaborate headdress complete with spiral antennae, while additional wings spread where human arms might rest.

Rendered in the softest pinks, yellows, creams and blues, she suggests something that might have fluttered from the detailed margins of an illuminated manuscript, her pale luminosity recalling the lustrous surfaces masters once achieved with patient oil glazes. A bright orange moth rests at her center, vivid against her dreamy palette, as if marking the spot where metamorphosis concentrates its most vital energies. Her form extends downward in a long moth-tail that ends in a delicate tuft, structured like the lepidoptera she channels, poised in that eternal moment between chrysalis and flight.

I gaze at this sculpture and want to sniff it too. What would a Flemish Moth perfume smell like? What is the fragrance of transformative slumber? Maybe dusty parchment, the powdery residue of ancient wings, pressed flowers between gilded vellum pages, the metallic sweetness of metamorphic silk.

“When I am creative, I realize: ‘This is Love,'” Forest has written, and this devotion permeates every carefully sculpted detail. Her creatures emerge from that same loving attention – beings caught in tender moments of transformation, rendered with the kind of patience that only deep affection allows. Each figure seems to hold knowledge born from their suspended state, as if their eternal pause between becoming has given them time to gather wisdom from both sides of transformation. What whispered revelations might they offer?

Perhaps the Winter Siren knows how to hold hope through the darkest months, while the Night Sphinx has memorized the true names of every star. The Goblin Spider might teach us about the duality that exists within us all, and the Flemish Moth could reveal how to sleep through our own metamorphosis without losing ourselves entirely. The Night Bloom understands the delicate balance between survival and grace, while the Octopoid Descending carries knowledge of what treasures wait in the deepest places we fear to explore. Forest’s work echoes ancient wisdom about transformation, a recognition that becoming requires both death and birth, that the spaces between are where magic gathers and essential truths dwell. Her creatures remind us that we, too, might be poised at the verge between what we were and what we might become.

Below waits an assembly of further enchantments, each a testament to Forest’s gift for seeing what mysteries live at the threshold, for coaxing them forth and offering them form.

Find Forest Rogers: Website // Instagram