Raised in a rural village in the Northeast of England, Forrest’s home was built on a filled mine shaft that buckled under the weight of two families embraced as a nuclear unit. As a sickly child she observed her parent’s physically demanding work ethic and when well, she would shadow her mother’s cleaning and decorating rituals, and learned the tools of her father’s trade, learning to lay bricks.
The first family member to attend higher education, while saving to fund her undergraduate study she trained as a developer of database systems. Wearing her rose-tinted glasses, she would describe this type of work to her parents, as an electronic form of building and cleaning a very tall, anti-Ballard ‘High Rise’ apartment block, where, akin to a Rubik cube puzzle, residents could be repositioned to live alongside one another, as equals, beyond systems of class.
After graduating with a First-Class, Fine Art Honours Degree, in 2007, she moved to London to catch-up on the world of contemporary art which had never been available to her growing-up. While working part-time in the capitals financial district, she witnessed the global financial crisis, after which, she has described the precarity of this economic shake-up as an undercurrent that would inform all of her practice.
During this time she was awarded a Creative Technician placement at Battersea Arts Centre, which was when she began to produce site-reflective installations beyond the gallery environment. Responding to two semi-derelict yet financially flourishing postcodes in the heart of London, in 2010, ‘Still Life’ and ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ explored the notion of what it meant to cleanse an environment literally, socially, and spiritually through the appropriation of cleaning rituals.
By 2014, she was awarded an Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A) residency, which was when her practice started to fully process the social impact of the economic calamity witnessed in 2008. Appropriating windows and their furnishings she began a psychologically charged conversation with Louise Bourgeois ‘Cell Series’, but unlike Bourgeois’ dwelling spaces, she emptied out her architectural units and titled them ‘Moratoriums‘, which she precariously counterbalanced as a declaration of a breaking point.
Graduating in 2017 with an MA Fine Art (Distinction) and a ‘Best Student’ award, as her portfolio of work began to reach new heights her architectural spreadsheets ‘Blind Faith’ and ‘Flex’, and the converging and diverging forces harnessed in ‘{a violent intersection}’ and ‘Kalopsia’ were all on the verge of collapse. At this point, she recalls her practice becoming the epitome of the word ‘jiggered’; a phrase her father used to utter when returning from sustaining long days of backbreaking work that left him incapacitated in his early 50’s, which was when ‘(net, work}’ evolved in the form of surveillance technology, where in, a series of live-streams kept a close eye on overseeing six of her structurally precarious sites, to draw attention to physical and psychological limits.
Upon graduating she was invited to spend six weeks exploring the Peak District’s mythology, topography, and geographic histories, through collaborative and experimental practice, funded by Quad Gallery, in Derby, where she began to explore the hollowness of language and image that can form over long periods of time. In ‘Rev{o,e}l{u,a}tions, 2018‘ she placed a virtual, live-streamed image of a domestic shrine within the gallery, locating personal myth making alongside the regions mythologies, while ‘The Mountain and the Cave, 2018‘ cross-examined contradictory proverbs that followed the contours of the peaks and caverns of the Manifold Valley.
By 2020/21, she was awarded a prestigious 10 month Fellowship by the South West Creative Technology Network to explore the mattering of human-data communication and summon a new form of data voice. Impacted by Covid lockdowns and looking for a way to slowly-process heartache with some emotional distance, what emerged was an evolving set of diagrammatic data drawings, titled ‘Love by Proxy’. What culminated from adapting Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theorem for Love, was a symbiotic relationship with machine learning and a series of wholehearted conversations (or conversations full of holes).
During 2023/24 she was invited to take part in a 6 month ‘Critical Mass’ programme with Mark Devereux Projects, to consider new methods of working with her growing ideas. By 2024, she was commissioned to create a Virtual Reality (VR) exhibition, in conversation with the established artist Steve Dutton MA RCA and produced in collaboration with digital artist and researcher Stephen Gray. The digital commission titled We Are only Partly Real, is due to launch in May 2025 and seeks to explore the potential of Virtual Reality not only as a platform to exhibit art within a VR version of Bristol’s Spike Island gallery, but also as an artistic medium in itself.