Laura Terry's 'How to Measure a Forest' Exhibition on Display Through Oct. 21 in Vol Walker Hall

Image courtesy of Laura Terry

"Metaphor" (45 by 40.5 inches, watercolor on paper with hand-stitching, 2022) is one of the pieces featured in an exhibition of new work by Laura Terry, an associate professor of architecture.

As the wood and timber initiatives of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design grow and strengthen, professor Laura Terry wanted to contribute to those conversations through an artist's lens.

"I wanted to tell a more poetic story of the forest," she said, "from the perspective of an artist and to engage in these initiatives in a way that was authentic to me."

The result is a body of work that she's sharing in the exhibition "How to Measure a Forest," now on display through Oct. 21 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus. This is part of the Fay Jones School's public exhibition series.

An opening reception will be held at 4:30 p.m., Friday, Aug. 26, and the public is invited to attend.

Terry, an associate professor of architecture, began her observations and research for this work at Anthony Timberlands in Bearden, Arkansas. It made sense to start there, since the company is the largest timber producer in the state, supports programs within the Fay Jones School and has more than 200,000 acres of (mostly) pine forests. In 2019, she spent several days with her guide there, asking questions as they drove through the forests and stopping to take photos and sketch.

Terry has plenty of trees available for study on the eight forested acres in the Ozarks that she shares with her husband and their pets. But she also spent a week in the Bavaria region of Germany; Rome, where she drew the umbrella pines of Italy that are under threat from a boring beetle; and in her native Georgia landscape, home to large oaks and plenty of pines.

When she started this work in 2019, she imagined having an exhibit no later than 2020. An opportunity to teach at the U of A Rome Center in the spring of 2020 caused her to rethink how she would approach the work. Because she would be traveling and working in a small space, she invested in a watercolor set. In Rome, she bought some small watercolor blocks, and she started making bark paintings, studies in the textures. These pieces were initial ideas, studies, and all from memory.

When the pandemic forced everyone back home in March 2020, she kept making the bark paintings, spending hours at her dining table. She created about 100 small paintings — each around 5 by 7 inches — with no idea what she was going to do with them.

"I think the act of painting them during those early months of the pandemic and lockdown was my therapy," she said. "I had worked with watercolor before, especially for quick studies or travel sketches. I never considered the medium for larger, sustained pieces. Watercolor is temperamental. You have to let it do what it wants to do. This is difficult for a control freak. So, maybe I learned to let things happen organically?"

Eventually, Terry cut up the small paintings, and they became the piece "Tree Tapestry." This is a collection of the cut-up watercolors, with a vertical grain, "quilted" together with hand-stitched circles.

Her template for the circles came from the scrap piece of cardboard left over after she punched out the pieces for a two-player board game she ordered during the pandemic. It occurred to her that the circle is the architectural convention for drawing trees in plan, which she liked. In addition to the circles stitched onto "Tree Tapestry," she used that template to make tiny, imagined landscapes, mostly of pine trees, that ended up populating different pieces throughout the exhibit.

During this creative journey, Terry re-discovered her love for representing the landscape. It's been the subject of her work for the last 20 years.

"For a while, the work was exclusively about reducing landscape elements to pure geometries. You could always find a line or edge that represented the horizon, and the color palette was usually referential to a landscape, but the work was so abstract that 'landscape' did not immediately come to mind," she said. "This new collection has pieces that are overtly and unmistakably landscape situated with pieces that are still abstract. I enjoy that both of my artistic sensibilities co-exist in this collection. It is forest-like in that way. Every tree, even among the same species, is different."

This exhibition features 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 work is to show the forest at micro and macro scales, so some pieces are at the scale of the bark while others reveal the forest from a distance.

One of the most textured pieces is "Measure Me by the Rings of Trees," a collage of graphite, monoprints, watercolor and found doilies. The piece is a vertical composition measuring 18 and 7/8 inches wide by 40 and 1/2 inches high.

"I was out in the woods in the winter, when the leaves were gone, and I was surprised at how colorful the landscape was. It was still green with moss and lichen," Terry said. "I observed the way lichen grows in circles on tree trunks, and I immediately thought about crocheted doilies, you know the ones your grandmother used for home décor?"

She acquired some doilies from a local thrifter and began adding them onto this piece. The resulting texture in this piece is important, she said, and the fact that it is made from many smaller pieces makes it "forest-like." She hand-stitched the concentric rings onto the composition, which adds another element of texture and layers a different meaning into the piece.

"A forest is a collection of trees; trees are individuals, unique, but collectively they make up the forest. I like this metaphor, the part-to-whole 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.

Terry applied for a Dean's Creative Research and Practice Grant in the Fay Jones School to support this research and body of work. That investment in and support of her creativity was critical to her success.

"Being an artist is a luxury. That is not lost on me. While the world was breaking into pieces during the pandemic, I was painting. Painting bark with watercolor on paper. The proposal I wrote and the funding I received is confirmation that this type of work matters," she said.

Her commitment to creating this work — and the related deadlines and schedules — gave her a way to stay focused, to look to the future when so much was uncertain.

"I tend to be 'glass half empty' except when I am making art. I get lost in the act of making. And I tend to do my best thinking while I am making," she said. "Or the opposite. I don't think at all; instead, I paint."

Admission to the exhibition is free. The exhibition gallery is located on the first floor of Vol Walker Hall, and it is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. The U of A is closed on Sept. 5 for the Labor Day holiday.