They say every hiker should pack the “10 essentials,” but artist Melinda Hurst Frye’s list strays from the standard. Instead of a lighter, she packs a laptop. Instead of a compass, she brings chopsticks. Also crammed into her trusty rucksack: USB cords, a backup battery, a bottle of Windex, a small paintbrush and, most essential of all, a flatbed scanner. (Sometimes an extra scanner, just to be safe.)
Such are the peculiar tools of Hurst Frye’s trade, wherein she heads into Northwest woods to photograph local ecosystems at the root — making high-resolution scans of stumps, soils, nurse logs and mycelium using a clunky piece of 1990s office technology.
“They’re not meant for this,” Hurst Frye says of the scanners, which she de-lids before taking into the forest — all the better to press the glass plate directly into the earth. “They’re not supposed to have spores on them, and they’re definitely not supposed to go outside.”
Asked if there’s an especially good scanner she’d love to have — a dream scanner — she replies with a laugh: “My dream is that they keep working.”
What sparked her desire to acquire retro office equipment on eBay for forest photo shoots? Blame it on a beetle.
“It started with my digging in the soil with my kids when they were very small,” Hurst Frye says. While gardening, the family spotted a beetle making its way across the dirt. “Both of the kids and myself, we were all in,” she says. They were invested in where it was going. “Then it dove underneath the strawberries and disappeared.” The kids quickly lost interest but Hurst Frye had something of an epiphany.
“That was pivotal for me,” she says. “I started thinking about the ecology of my front yard very differently … like, there’s something else here, something underneath, and what does that look like?”
A fine-art photographer with an ecological bent, Hurst Frye had seen scanners used for delicate botanical documentation starting in the early 2000s. But she wanted to try something more “punk rock” — pushing the machines directly in the soil to tell the stories of what lies beneath. One of her first attempts, from 2016, is called “Under the Carrots.” The cross-section scan reveals orange roots, a sprouted seedling and a couple of worms curving through the dirt.
Now Hurst Frye employs scanners in two ways, indoors and out. For her home studio practice, she brings forest finds home — small mushrooms, cedar starts, moss and emerging flora — and arranges them like a bouquet on top of the scanner glass. In these works, her artistic eye is visible in the careful collage. Sometimes she has five scanners in progress at once, the machines humming and clicking as the camera carriages make their slow progress under the glass, giving the sense of a mad scientist (or mad botanist) at work.
“The scanner has a sort of weird perspective and light that I’m really into,” Hurst Frye says, noting the device’s tendency to interpret everything outside its shallow depth of field as pitch black. “It feels almost like you’re painting, in the sense that you’re composing on the glass,” she says. “It also has this theatrical feel, like you’re laying something out for a stage.”
That sense of stage design is evident in her recent series Quiet Fruit, in which the natural elements are so crisp and colorful as to seem hyperreal or human-made. Collected pine cones, white mushroom stems and lichen leap out from the dark background, formerly shaded microcosms suddenly given their moment in the scanner’s spotlight.
Some of these photos contain ghostly white wisps, an artifact of leaving mushrooms on the scanner long enough that they cast spores in slow motion. “The spores release and settle back onto the glass,” Hurst Frye explains. “A [regular] camera can’t give me that, right?” With this unauthorized usage, the scanner is depicting forest decomposition and regeneration in process. Which is precisely what the artist is aiming to capture.
“It’s about more than mushrooms,” Hurst Frye says of her work. “It’s about visual evidence of the cycle … a shorthand that gives the viewer this fleeting evidence of how the forest floor is working and healthy.”
Born in 1977 and having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, Hurst Frye has been traversing forest floors her whole life. In the late 1980s her parents built a house in Kenmore at the edge of Saint Edward State Park (a wooded 326-acre expanse she fondly calls St. Ed’s). But well before they moved in, the family frequented the area, tromping the trails that lead down to Lake Washington and back.
“I spent my childhood running through these woods,” Hurst Frye recalls, “and then as a teenager … this was definitely where I found freedom.” She remembers her feet caked in mud, her meet-ups with friends for woodland adventures and how seasonal changes shifted the look of the alders, maples and cedars.
Hurst Frye moved to Portland in 1996 to attend the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she studied printmaking (an art form in which “pulling a print” echoes both the physicality and surprise of the scanner process). A few years later, she moved to Georgia to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design and earned an MFA in photography. Since returning to Seattle in 2007, she’s taught photography at The Art Institute, Photographic Center Northwest, Cornish College and Seattle University.
Upon her mother’s death from cancer in 2019, Hurst Frye’s father wanted to move to a smaller home but was hesitant to sell the house he’d built for his family. So in 2020, Hurst Frye moved into her childhood home with her husband and two young children. The familial cycle regenerated in the same spot, like a healthy ecosystem.
Now her kids run down the sloped backyard and onto the forest trails tracing through St. Ed’s. “They build forts in there and go foraging on their own,” she says. “This place feels very cyclical.”
For decades, Hurst Frye has known where the owls tend to roost and where coyotes make their dens in this urban forest. She gives her favorite trees little love pats. “I have been hiking this trail since I could walk,” she says. Yet as an adult living adjacent to St. Ed’s she still finds surprises, still delights in discovering the signals of seasonal rebirth.
Which brings us back into the woods, for the second way Hurst Frye uses her scanners to make art: packing them up for a field trip in the forest and pressing them tightly against stumps and logs or into the dirt itself.
Once she picks a location (often in the nearby Cascade foothills), she hikes a bit off-trail, slows down and starts looking. “I need to decide, ‘What’s the visual story?’ and what are the markers of that?” Hurst Frye says. “And then it’s a lot of slow walking and looking at ground level and cataloging — which plants I’m seeing, what the activity is — and then finding a spot where that is all occurring at once.”
She kneels, maybe takes out her spade to gently unearth the top layer of soil to see what might be wriggling or regrowing underneath. She looks for tender roots, tiny flowers and creepy-crawlies — everything hints at the natural cycles and forest rejuvenation. She might use her chopsticks to move dead leaves out of the frame.
The goal: find a visual scene that reveals “how the systems of these vast landscapes are evident in these smaller vignettes,” Hurst Frye says. She cleans off the scanner glass, plugs the surge protector into the battery and hopes she can get an angle that captures the shot. Sometimes that means struggling to hold a hefty scanner perfectly still against a bumpy tree stump for several minutes, a serious arm workout.
A new series, Regeneration, has Hurst Frye making regular visits to the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest near Skykomish. This too is a bit of a homecoming, as she says her parents loved hiking in the Cascade Range and took her exploring on many trails in her youth. Now she’s back, checking in on the state of forest ecology after the Bolt Creek Fire, a human-caused wildfire that burned nearly 15,000 acres in 2022.
“I get to see how it regrows, how it’s recovering,” she says of her seasonal trips. “Sometimes it’s the invasives, sometimes it’s cedar starts, but every time it’s in a different stage.”
Her process is slow, cumbersome and messy, but the results in series such as The Forest Floor are delicate and lovely: quiet scenes of ferns unfolding, of fungus pushing up through soil and kickstarting the woodland understory. “The surface is not a border, but an entrance,” Hurst Frye says, recalling the beetle’s journey. She hopes her photographs unearth the vast network busy beneath our feet, regenerating the natural landscape above.
Catch up with the artists featured in the first season of Art by Northwest, and watch new Season 2 episodes as they roll out in August, September and October, 2025.
Brangien Davis
