Drawing You Outside: Project Evergreen

 

Drawing You Outside: Project Evergreen is a multidisciplinary art project and documentary film exploring the restorative power at the Evergreen Conservancy, where a series of filtration wetlands now sitting atop an abandoned coal mine, transforming toxic Acid Mine Drainage into clean water for the Allegheny River tributary. For Christine, this project is her personal homecoming. Having grown up in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, she is returning to her family’s roots to translate a legacy of extraction into a future of healing. This is an ongoing, poetic film and art collaboration initiated in 2019 by visual artist Christine Forni with her husband and documentary film director James Forni. Deeply rooted in a partnership with the natural world, this work-in-progress utilizes film projection loops and cinematic fragments to explore the symbiotic relationship between ecological stewardship and creative expression. By translating the silent narratives of a healing landscape into a shared visual language, the artists explore profound themes of environmental transformation, permanence, and the delicate balance of recovering ecosystems.

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Christine’s work centers on the physical "soil of the site." She reclaims fallen branches to create artisanal charcoal and collects filtered iron oxide pigment directly from the Conservancy’s purification ponds. In Fall 2026, she’ll lead “Drawing You Outside," an immersive community project where participants use these site-sourced materials to open dialogue with their community and to render the very ecosystem being saved.

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This process culminates in an exhibition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (Fall 2026), featuring mural-sized drawings that make the "unseen" chemistry of land restoration tangible. James Forni her husband and film director will continue to document the environmental process. Together their film, "Project Evergreen,” employs poetic cinematography and underwater perspectives to chronicle this rural "proof-positive" model of agency. A screening of their work will be shown in Chicago (Spring 2027) at Mana Contemporary, Christine’s aims to bridge the gap between rural stewardship and urban audiences, proving that localized devotion can spark global-scale environmental change.

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Christine Forni 

Christine Forni is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work explores the intricate links between human behavior and the natural world. Driven by a sense of environmental compassion, her practice creates poetic connections between habitat, alchemy, anthropology, and memory.

Forni’s methodology is rooted in rigorous observation and analysis, a focus that solidified during residencies at Paris’s École du Breuil and the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie

comparée. Her work often features sculptural botanical drawings that enlarge microscopic details of naturalist specimens, alongside paintings that incorporate site-specific soil to evoke visual echoes of their environmental histories.

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She has exhibited at venues such as Ueno Royal Japanese Art Museum and Awagami Paper Museum (Japan), DeCordova Sculpture Museum (Massachusetts), Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico), Museo Internazionale Italia Arte and Museo di Scienze Naturali (Italy), Parlour & Ramp, Ignition project space and Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago).

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James Forni 

James Forni, a Chicago-based award-winning director, producer, writer, and photographer, is the creative force behind Octane Rich Films. A compelling storyteller, James excels at transforming intricate subjects into deeply resonant narrative experiences across a range of mediums, feature documentaries, fiction episodic pilots and short films.

He created the official museum film for Ashes and Snow, capturing architect Shigeru Ban's visionary Nomadic Museum and Gregory Colbert's evocative photography. In 2009, he collaborated with Lenny Kravitz and five musical acts on Levi's "Spirit of Denim" campaign. A year later, he directed a short documentary on sculptor Jaume Plensa at New York's Grand Central Station. At Chicago's Links Hall, he co-created Floating City, an immersive film-and-dance performance with choreographer Kristina Isabella and composer Christopher Preissing. James’s most personal project chronicles Isi Veleris — Holocaust survivor, Warhol-era photographer, and protégé of Richard Avedon — currently in post-production in three languages. He is now filming Todd Doc, a multi-part portrait of musician Todd Rundgren's five-decade career. In the past three years, James collaborated with his wife Christine to create and film the documentary Project Evergreen. The multi-dimensional story encompasses Christine’s artistic vision evolving from the inspired story of conservation and her environmental community art practice.