Processie (Procession)

Three women in stiff white winged caps walk in single file toward a door set into a vast tree, whose bark has grown into a wall of carved ancestral faces and a robed idol. The sacred grove, the forest treated as a temple, is older than any church: Roman writers described groves so dark and dense that they filled visitors with the certain presence of a god. Wiedijk's carved bark turns the trees into exactly that, a congregation of watching faces. His three pilgrims approach with the awe of a Caspar David Friedrich landscape and a pagan shiver running underneath, devotion and dread arriving at the door together.