Oak Trees Get New Life in Tableau Inside Vol Walker Hall

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Fletcher Cox, center, talks about the wooden tableau that now sits in the central corridor of the main floor of Vol Walker Hall.

Fletcher Cox arrived in Fayetteville the week before classes began to install a unique piece of woodwork in the central corridor of Vol Walker Hall. He built a 23-foot-long tableau from the wood of two red oak trees that once stood outside.

Cox, an artist from Jackson, Miss., taught for 15 years in the fifth-year architecture program at Mississippi State University. He also taught in the short-lived Memphis Center for Architecture, headed by architect Coleman Coker, a long-time friend to Marlon Blackwell.

From that connection, Cox and Blackwell got to know one another over the past decade or so, and they've served on design juries together. They've looked for a chance to collaborate on a project, especially after Blackwell saw the 25-foot, triangular conference table Cox created for Bridges Center in Memphis, designed by Coker.

That opportunity finally came with the addition of the Steven L. Anderson Design Center and renovation of Vol Walker Hall, home to the Fay Jones School of Architecture. Blackwell's firm was lead architect on the project. Two trees would have to come down, and the architects called Cox to see what he thought he could create from the wood.

The red oaks had grown tall, thriving in an open space with no competition, between Vol Walker Hall (originally the campus library) and the current Mullins Library. Their rings were wide; in one tree they totaled 75, making it the same age as Vol Walker Hall.

Friends of his in Jackson went to the U of A, and they recalled the trees when he described their location. "I think people fell in love under those trees and did their homework under those trees," Cox said.

From photographs Cox saw early in the project, he knew the trees had been damaged during an ice storm in recent years and were starting to die. "You could tell by looking at them; they were dropping the ends of branches," Cox said. "So it's not a tragedy that they were brought down when they were."

To the tips of the branches, the trees stood about 45 to 50 feet. But the usable parts for his work were the trunks: 26 and 30 feet long.

"The whole thing about that tableau, as they're calling it, is that the boards are continuous. There are no breaks, no joints," Cox said. "So you're looking at the entire life of the tree as you look at the table."

As Cox began brainstorming what he could create, the architects were designing the building. Early on, the architects decided to open up the core of the main floor, where library stacks and shelving once stood, to create a central axis through the building and through campus, ultimately connecting Arkansas Avenue to the Arkansas Union for pedestrians.

The architects knew they wanted to place this piece that Cox would create in this central spot. When they started on the building design, they came up with a solid, rectangular shape.

Blackwell said, for this transformation of raw wood into art, the tableau is roughly the dimensions of each vitrine in the gallery of Vol Walker Hall, turned on the side. "To me, it was about form, rather than art or sculpture," Blackwell said. "It's about architecture, really," Cox added.

Cox has done several large projects that were assembled on site: the 42-foot-long circulation desk at the Jackson Public Library; that table for the Bridges Center; and a 25-foot conference table for the federal courthouse in Jackson.

"This is the biggest, heaviest monolithic thing I have ever done," he said of the tableau.

With a rectangle in mind, Cox projected the photographs the architects had sent and marked where he wanted the contractors to cut the trees when they took them down in summer 2011.

A sawyer from Tallulah, Miss., sent a truck to retrieve the tree trunks. After the boards were cut, they went to a dry kiln operator north of Jackson, where they were air dried for about 11 months. The dry kiln dramatically accelerated the drying of the wood.

Cox got the boards in his shop about a year ago, and started his work this spring, removing the bark from the rough boards, and using planers and saws to get the pieces just right.

Four main boards cover the top of the tableau, and they run the entire 23 feet of the piece. The total across is 5 feet 6 inches, with each board averaging more than a foot wide. The rest of the boards are only 3 inches wide for the long ones that run along the sides, and 4 inches wide for the ones that make up each end.

Cox built the tableau layer by layer around an interior steel frame, gluing and clamping boards as he went. At each corner, Cox stacked the joints of the side and end pieces the way a mason turns a corner on a brick wall.

With assembly done, it was time to finish. He used an electric hand planer to flatten the surface, then grinded and sanded it. He filled all the disparities, like knots that had shrunk and split open during the drying process. He used wedges and glue to make the surface continuous.

Cox has done other projects that reuse materials. For Coleman Coker, Cox took down a sand pine tree at Seaside and created a coffee table for the home built on the site. Cox also has made front doors and fireplace mantels from trees removed from a home's construction site.

"To me, it's like giving a tree a second life," he said.

Cox learned a lot about these oak trees when handling the boards. They had had a hard life. Some areas show incipient rot, where bacteria chewed on the wood. He pointed out inclusions, areas that were once on the outside of the tree. But, as the branches got wider and wider, they grew together, and the bark stayed inside.

The boards on the top of the tableau show that the tree was a strong, sturdy and healthy. On the eastern end, the base of the tree, the grain is straight. Whatever knots and branches had happened in the youth of the tree were long gone. "The farther up the tree you go, the younger and younger the wood is, the more and more active the branches and leaves are," he said.

"It is so unusual to see so much of the character of the tree being expressed in such a simple geometric shape as this rectangular solid. It would be impossible without the wide boards and the long continuous boards."

Otherwise, "You would have a pastiche of wood. What you have here is a coherent story."