丹尼尔·梅里克（Danielle Mericle）的《黑木》探讨了历史的各种问题，以及我们记录和学习历史的集体力量。他将被遗弃的希腊罗马石膏、古老的红杉林、艺术家亲笔等照片交织在一起，邀请我们将历史视为一个流动的过程，而不是一个静态的真理。

这些曾经受到高度重视的铸像，在20世纪早期被认为缺乏原作的艺术性和灵气，而视为毫无价值的复制品，尽管许多“原作”实际上也是希腊文物的罗马复制品，如今它们以原始档案照片的形式出现在书中。在两次世界大战期间，许多“原作”都被损坏或毁坏了，这些铸像现在反而被认为是最权威的版本。

尽管我们试图了解和保存我们的过去，但不可避免地受到知识转变、意识形态和历史真相变化等影响。本书后记结合了复杂的图像序列和个人挽歌，让我们在广泛而不固定的历史框架内找到一种哀悼、失落和我们自己叙述的具体内容，重新调整我们的尺度感。

Danielle Mericle’s The Dark Wood explores broad questions of history and our collective ability to document and learn from the past. Through intertwined images of abandoned Greco-Roman casts, an ancient Sequoia forest and the artist's own texts, Mericle invites us to consider history as a fluid process rather than a static truth.

The once highly valued casts which appear in the book as original and archival photographs were rejected as worthless copies during the early part of the 20th century, under the belief that they lacked the artistry and aura of the originals, despite the fact that many of the 'originals' were in fact Roman copies of Greek artefacts. During the two World Wars, many of these 'originals' were damaged or destroyed, and the casts are now considered some of the most authoritative versions available.

Though we attempt to understand and preserve our past, the endeavour is subject to inevitable shifts in knowledge, the whims of ideology, and the vagaries of historical truth. With an epilogue that grounds the complex sequence of images in personal elegy, The Dark Wood recalibrates our sense of scale by allowing us to locate a sense of mourning, loss and the specifics of our own narratives within the broad and unfixed framework of history.