
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 17, 1994                   TAG: 9403170161
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-1   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: By ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD                                LENGTH: Medium

FROM PILE OF DEBRIS TO WORK OF ART

Maybe it was the river birch branch, maybe it was the beech. In the huge stack of multispecies tree limbs lay pieces of old friends lost in the winter's ice storms.

But they are not consigned to the compost heap, or, worse, an undignified several weeks dumped along the sidewalk. The stack of limbs piled outside Radford University's art annex will spend the next week reposing in that rarest of state: the art form.

"Fallen" was a work-in-progress Wednesday, when, ironically enough, snowflakes swirled. Not ice bits. And not the warm spring breezes that flowed when work began Tuesday. Associate art professor Charlie Brouwer hauled limbs from the back of his pickup, as students Christina Diaz and Eric Stites hauled alongside.

When all's said and done - hopefully by late Wednesday - a downed, uprooted tree formed from lost branches will stretch across a walkway midcampus, then proceed 70 feet down the lawn.

In artspeak, the piece is part of the growing trend of temporary works. After a week, it's gone. It looks to nature. And it is, if nothing else, accessible.

"I grew up making stuff from wood," said Brouwer. "Sticks. Scrap wood. Everybody did."

And everybody peered from their windows, aghast, at all the trees felled after this winter's ice storms.

"It was like a tornado had come through," said Stites, a freshman in Brouwer's sculpture class.

Musing on "Fallen," Diaz said, "It totally represents everything that was going on this winter. With all the trees fallen, it was really sad."

And this tree-as-friend sentiment is not to be discounted. Stites stuck his work-gloved hand into the pile and patted a super-heavy hemlock limb. How on earth did the weather strike down that sucker? he wondered. It was his favorite of the limbs.

Said Diaz: "I always liked maple trees. They give you lots of shadow. And eucalyptus, because I like the way they smell."

Brouwer recalled J.R. Tolkien's works and the forest with the golden leaves. When Brouwer was a kid, he used to walk through the beech forests, with their golden fall leaves, with his buddies.

"We'd look up for the elves," he laughed.

They all had a story about a tree. They all felt some loss after the trees fell in the ice storms.

Ergo, "Fallen."

by CNB