Measuring a Forest

As the wood and timber initiatives of the Fay Jones School grow and strengthen, Laura Terry wanted to contribute to those conversations through an artist’s lens. The result was a body of work that she shared in the exhibition “How to Measure a Forest,” displayed in fall 2022 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery of Vol Walker Hall.

Terry, an associate professor of architecture, began her observations and research for this work in 2019, sketching and taking photos at Anthony Timberlands in Bearden, Arkansas. The company is the largest timber producer in the state, supports programs within the school and has more than 200,000 acres of (mostly) pine forests.

She drew on her collective experiences with the trees and forests of her home in the Ozarks, in the Bavaria region of Germany, in her native Georgia landscape, and in Rome, where she taught briefly in the spring 2020 semester. And she kept making paintings when the pandemic forced everyone back home in March 2020, spending hours at her dining table.

This exhibition featured nearly 30 pieces — the smallest just 4 by 4 inches and the largest 48 by 56 inches, with all sizes in between. The intent of the body of work was to show the forest at micro and macro scales, so some pieces were at the scale of the bark while others revealed the forest from a distance. A Dean’s Creative Research and Practice Grant from the Fay Jones School supported this research and body of work.

During this creative journey, Terry re-discovered her love for representing the landscape, the subject of her work for the last 20 years. “A forest is a collection of trees; trees are individuals, unique, but collectively they make up the forest. I like this metaphor, the part-towhole relationship that is in the work. In fact, many of the pieces in this exhibit are collections or aggregates of smaller pieces combined to make a larger piece,” she said.

— Michelle Parks

ReView: Spring/Summer 2023