with Katie Hargrave

Where There Were Many looks to the forest as a way to understand collaboration, ethics, growing, and undoing. In collaboration with Luther art department students, Katie Hargrave and I used the gallery as a dynamic and changing site to explore the metaphoric relationship between building and unbuilding in response to how we think about forests as natural and conversely contrived systems. The exhibit was an ongoing intervention in the gallery where students used repurposed wood to build a forest.

Where There Were Many is one in a series of works by Katie and myself that propose acts of undoing as opportunities for conversations about ethics and ecology. In Where There Were Many, we invited students into our research on the Nebraska National Forest, a hand planted forest in the treeless landscape of the Nebraska Sand Hills. Created in 1902, the forest is filled with cottonwood, red and yellow pine, and other majestic fast growing trees. These trees grow big in sand that normally does not support such growth, but in a strange twist, seeds from these trees do not germinate, forcing park rangers to constantly replant seedlings to maintain the idea of the forest. What happens to natural forest succession and natural landscapes when students hand-fabricate and plant trees in the gallery.

Luther College Gallery — Luther, Iowa — 2015