Artwork by Laura Terry Selected for 'Ballad of the Farm' Exhibit in Nebraska

Courtesy of Laura Terry

"Plow the Good Earth," a work created by Laura Terry, is part of a collaborative art exhibition at the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art in David City, Nebraska. The four panels of the piece each measure 38 by 18 inches, for a total width of 72 inches.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A patchwork quilt covers the window of a red barn, the surrounding farmland itself blanketed in white snow.

This scene of winter is just one narrative Laura Terry tells in her new artwork, which was selected for the exhibit "Ballad of the Farm: Then, Now, Tomorrow" at the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art in David City, Nebraska. Terry plans to attend the opening reception this Saturday, May 23, and the show remains on display through Sept. 13.

She is one of 11 artists from a six-state region who were asked to be part of this collaborative art exhibition. The multi-artist project combines crowd-sourced historic farm photographs from the early to mid-1900s with contemporary artworks inspired by the photographs.

"Plow the Good Earth" is the title of the work created by Terry, an associate professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture. Her contribution to this exhibit is a polyptych of four panels, each measuring 38 by 18 inches and spanning a total 72 inches wide. Each panel represents one of the four seasons and tells its own story, a stanza of a song. And they are displayed next to each other, completing a comprehensive composition.

"I have always been interested in the structure and geometry of the landscape, particularly that of farmland," Terry said.

The image that inspired her artwork was an aerial view of a farm. She translated that image, abstractly, across the four panels so that each is part of the whole. She also is intrigued by the transformation of the landscape due to the seasons.

"Nature is constantly causing change, sometimes in violent ways, like tornadoes, droughts, insect invasions," she said. "Humans are in a constant struggle to combat nature, to control it, sometimes successfully, and other times in bitter, failing ways."

For this piece, Terry sketched what she saw in that historic photograph: the farmhouse, barns, outbuildings and other structures. The arrangement of these elements on the farm indicated their use and suggested patterns of work. There also were pieces of farm equipment and rows of plowed fields, which reinforced the geometric order present in the landscape.

Then, she analyzed her initial sketch to establish the geometric structure of the painting. The identified geometries became the pieces she used to construct and structure her painting.

Her analytical image evoked a quilt-like quality, which is how she artistically thinks about the agrarian landscape. She then used the geometries and relationships to extract and abstract another pattern of forms and colors, telling the story of the passage of seasons and time.

A site is much more than its present condition, Terry said. It also contains the past, retaining the memory of past events, both beautiful and devastating.

Many of the historic photos she worked from bore dates, which allowed her to organize them from oldest to most recent, left to right, creating a sort of timeline in her piece. Two images - one of a tornado, the other a plowed field - were particularly significant to the development of this painting. The tornado indicates the destructive power of nature, which is out of human control. The plowed field with a crop irrigation system represents the innovations in technology, manmade efforts or attempts at control.

"These marks that nature makes in the land are different than the physical transformation that happens at the hands of humans," she said. "We regularize acreage for efficiency. We build in clusters to make the chores easier. Our intervention on the landscape is no less beautiful or devastating."

As Terry studied the original photograph, she discovered hexagonal shapes in the outlines of some structures. She calls this "serendipitous," as bees and honeycombs have been featured prominently in her artwork for a long time.

"In this case, it seems particularly important to the overall theme of modern farming, non-GMOs, the prevalence of pesticides and the mass loss of the honeybee," Terry said.

She experimented with three-dimensional models of the honeybee to find the right one. Then, she recreated three honeybees using a 3-D printer and painted them gold. She attached the bees to the surface of this piece, on the panel representing summer, securing them in recessed hexagonal spaces that represent a honeycomb and that were created using a computer-controlled router.

Artists participating in the "Ballad of the Farm" exhibit are from Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. The project is supported in part by an award from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council.