"Le Museé du le Grand Dehors (The Museum of the Great Outdoors) is a sculptural work that uses a tree as the conceptual lens through which we critically examine and expand our experience of western, human-centered notions of ‘nature’ and environment. The title is drawn from the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux of the speculative realism movement, who refers to le grand dehors as that which reaches outside of possible human perception or knowledge. Many continental philosophers, particularly in the lineage of Kant, argue that human knowledge systems are the center of what is knowable and even “real,” because humans are the only beings capable of dimensional perception/consciousness. It is our interest to generate a work that glimpses the edges of our knowledge by expanding a single form into deep time."

Our museum as sculpture took the form of a small mysterious building clad in raw, smoked rubber shingles, interrupted by a fallen rubber tree from a nearby rubber plantation. When the tree intersects the museum, it transforms to pure carbon having been charcoalized at local charcoal kilns. On the other side of the museum, the rubber tree canopy continues. Along the way, museum "didactics" label the parts of the tree and forest with reminders of the geological time frames we exist within. Once inside the museum, the didactics stop and the visitor is immersed in a cave-like carbon interior, a sort of inverse of its more orthogonally familiar exterior. Lit only with 3 tunnels of natural light, the interior surfaces are made up of a stucco created with the carbon of crushed charcoal.

The project included several months of programming, entitled Forest University, that hosted artists, art historians, forest educators, forest managers, indigenous activists, Muslim and Buddhist thinkers in conversations designed to illuminate and contemplate the relationship between humans and the forest.