Jensen Kugler
A&E Editor
The College of Wooster Art Museum (CWAM) is currently showing work by artist Susan Stair ’76 in an exhibition titled “Radically Rooted.” Stair gave a talk about her work on Sept. 22, and the exhibition will be up until Dec. 4.
Stair’s work emphasizes how trees act as a “vast community of mutual care and interdependence.” Her pieces invite the viewer to “contemplate trees as biological phenomena, organisms we live alongside, and metaphors for tenacity, resilience, and community.”
Upon entering the room, visitors are faced with natural textures and colors in the pieces on the walls. The largest piece in the room covers almost an entire wall, measuring in at 8 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Completed in 2019 as a celebration of the diasporic communities in her home of New York City, “Roots on Fire” is a sculptural installation resembling the roots of a tree. Interspersed with tree bark textures are semi-abstract mosaic sections meant to represent various flags.
To the right of “Roots on Fire” is a collection of ceramic tiles that resemble texture studies of various trees, alongside a larger mosaic piece. Completed this year as part of her campus residency last semester, these sculptural pieces are collectively titled “Forest Song Wooster.” As she described during her artist’s talk, Stair takes casts of actual trees to create these impressions. She makes an effort to cast trees in the immediate vicinity of her shows whenever possible, encouraging viewers to visit with the trees nearest to them.
“The most exciting trees are not the tallest ones or the widest ones. They’re the ones next to you because they’re providing more oxygen,” said Stair.
Featured alongside “Forest Song Wooster” is an older collection of clay pieces referred to as “Tree Portraits” completed over the years 2010-2022. Each piece was given an individual name after the particular tree its texture comes from.
The remainder of Stair’s space in the gallery is filled with collage pieces that explore how living things interact with various natural forces. For example, “Heliotropism” is a visual response to solar movement.
“Radically Rooted” is the culmination of many years of creative work and the product of a lifelong love affair with the natural world.
“They say that all of your memories are in pictures initially,” said Stair. “My pictures, even after language, are trees. They’re intertwined, they’re tangled and I was interested in that.”
At the College, Stair was initially a political science major. She switched to art after she “did a watercolor and just kind of didn’t stop.”
After graduating from Wooster, Stair further developed her printmaking skills at the University of Delaware. In the years following, she created artwork in a variety of places, including Hong Kong and the Catskills. Her work is currently installed in New York City and Washington, D.C.
Stair’s art varies in both material and subject matter, but there are a few throughlines. She works very intentionally in and about space, with a special focus on the value of the natural world. Most relevantly to this particular exhibition, Stair likes to use unconventional shapes and techniques to force audiences to pause.
“I like to just change things so everybody’s saying, ‘What is it?’ all the time and having to work hard at looking. There’s nothing obvious about nature. It’s not still and it’s very complex,” said Stair.
She is also drawn to gold because of its association with richness and value.
“I always put gold in my pieces to show that trees have huge value. They are the most valuable thing we have,” Stair stated.
Stair emphasized the connections between people and trees, asserting that there is a “real universality in roots and in all of our bodies.” If nothing else, “Radically Rooted” makes an argument for inter-relationality and the dissipation of boundaries between disciplines. In this vein, readers may also be interested in visiting the second CWAM gallery, which is currently highlighting research from The College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab. The Tree Ring Lab aims to “assemble long tree-ring chronologies from oaks by sampling both living trees and old wood.” This snapshot into campus research gives scientific weight to its partner exhibit. For the rest of the semester, both “Radically Rooted” and the Tree Ring Lab will be open to tree lovers and skeptics alike.
The College of Wooster Art Museum is open 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Wednesday through Friday and 1-4 p.m. on Saturday.
