If you haven’t had a chance to see “Longleaf Lines,” Kristin Leachman’s exhibition that explores the South’s once-prevalent longleaf forest ecosystem, next Thursday’s programming is a unique opportunity to visit the museum. Alongside Leachman’s exhibition, on view until next month, the museum is hosting a viewing of “Longleaf: The Heart of Pine,” by documentarian Rex Jones. The viewing will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with Jones, who produced and directed the film and serves as an adjunct assistant professor of the Southern Documentary Project at the University of Mississippi.
If you’re unfamiliar with the history of longleaf forests in the south, you are not alone. Several documentary subjects question why the ecological history of these forests is not more widely known. Once estimated at 85 – 90 million acres, only 1 percent of these forests still exist today. Looking at the landscape of south Georgia, it’s hard to imagine that these 2-million-year-old forests were ever even there at all. Side by side, the film and exhibition offer a fully immersive reflection on the human relationship with nature and understanding of how this vast ecosystem became all but lost in our collective consciousness. The film’s description offers more for consideration:
Towering stands of old-growth longleaf pine (pinus palustris) once covered over 90 million acres while stretching from southern Virginia to eastern Texas. Today, the total acreage is about 2 million, with only about 2,000 of that considered old growth. As the South was settled and northern timber supplies were exhausted, this incredible natural resource was very nearly removed from the South’s landscape and collective consciousness. “Longleaf: The Heart of Pine,” produced by award-winning documentarian Rex Jones, is a cultural and natural history of the South’s ancient primeval forest and how it might still be saved.
The film features interviews and perspectives from southern foresters, conservationists and longtime residents with a familial connection to the cultural history of longleaf forests, including “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” author Janisse Ray, who visited the museum in November. Our landscape is part of our cultural history, she says. “That landscape made us who we are,” she notes in the film. “What are the stories that we tell each other when we destroy an entire landscape?”
When Leachman traveled to southwest Georgia in June of 2020, as part of her “Fifty Forests” project, she sunk herself into the detailed beauty of an old-growth longleaf pine forest. The resulting exhibition is an attempt to prompt examination and illuminate the decimation of this ecosystem and our relationship with nature today. As the exhibition brochure notes:
Longleaf forests are one of the most biologically rich ecosystems in the world, second only to tropical rainforests; however, today these forests primarily grow on private lands and are largely unfamiliar to the general public. Through their scale and intimacy, Leachman’s paintings collapse this sense of distance and offer viewers a physically immersive experience. Focused on the longleaf’s bark formations, her works enlarge these patterns into monumentally scaled biomorphic abstractions.Capturing the tree’s marvelously scaly and fire-resistant surface, Leachman’s pictures also appear singed with fire. This effect points to the destructive histories of these landscapes. Longleaf once spanned 90 million acres across the southern United States, but declined to just 3 million acres after centuries of harvesting for ship masts, railroad ties and turpentine farming. These forests would have been cleared entirely for development had it not been for quail hunting, which became popular in the 1800s. The scorched surfaces of Leachman’s pictures also correspond with the practice of regular burn cycles that foresters now use to maintain the longleaf ecosystem. As both a ravaging and refining force, fire is a fitting metaphor for the revitalized forests of longleaf pine, which today rise phoenix-like from the ashes.
Join us at the museum for this viewing and discussion next Thursday at 7 p.m., courtesy of the Southern Documentary Project at the University of Mississippi. Unable to make it in person? You can view the film online at: https://vimeo.com/rexjones, but be sure to come visit Leachman’s exhibition before it leaves the museum next month.
“Ultimately, Leachman’s paintings articulate the relationships between painting and nature, even in the artistic materials she employs. She is pioneering the use of reclaimed earth pigments, produced from minerals like iron oxide pulled from US riverways historically polluted by mining,” notes exhibition curator and the Georgia Museum of Art’s curator of American art Jeffrey Richmond-Moll. “The paints’ purple and brown hues anchor the palette of her pictures, visually depicting and materially supporting efforts in environmental conservation. They also align the viewer within a wider ecosystem, conjuring what philosopher Timothy Morton has called ‘the mesh’: a radically open form of interconnection without a center, which links things living and nonliving, human and nonhuman. With these paintings, we ought not miss the forest for the trees. By immersing us in the longleaf through monumentally scaled abstractions and by seeking ecological remediation through their very materials, Leachman’s paintings bring hope that balanced coexistence with nature may one day be possible.”
Authored by:
Jessica Luton
