Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Cheri Bohn has been making tree root sculptures and stained glass art since 2001. Her art will be featured this month at the Fayetteville Underground and the Bank of Fayetteville.
When Cheri Bohn is looking for inspiration for her next sculpture, she walks around in the Arkansas backwoods where her land is about two miles from the White River.
Usually along with her two boys, she searches for dead trees and their twisted roots they leave behind. Using a visualization technique, she looks at a section of the root and imagines what the “root wants to be.” Sometimes she’ll find just a limb, other times an entire chunk of the tree depending on whatever it is she sees in the root.
“I’ll go yank on a tree that fell over in the river and get pieces of them that are ready to come off,” she said. “Sometimes they will be deeply embedded into the ground to a root that won’t give way and I’ll leave it there until it’s ready to come out.”
Whether it’s a dragon, tropical bird, ocean wave, robot or whatever Bohn sees the root as, she treats the wood with polyurethane and creates stained glass and jewelry to bring the creature or thing to life from the dead root. The process can take anywhere from a week to months. She’s done more than 300 pieces, she said.
“One day I saw a dragon in one, and I had an epiphany,” she said. “I knew it was something unique and different, and as an artist, you always want to tap into something different.”
Courtesy Photo
Cheri Bohn’s jungle cat sculpture will be the centerpiece of her upcoming “Predator and Prey” exhibit at the Fayetteville Underground, starting Oct. 6 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Bohn’s work will be a featured display at the Fayetteville Underground and the Bank of Fayetteville throughout October. The opening for the “Predator and Prey” exhibit at the Fayetteville Underground will commence Oct. 6 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. There is also going to be a “Meet the Artist” reception and conversation on Oct. 29 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Fayetteville Underground.
Bohn’s centerpiece of the “Predator and Prey” exhibit is a gnarled root Bohn saw as a jungle panther. She placed turquoise jewels on the eyes, made subtle carvings to emphasize the cat features, glued on an ear and a foot and added white stained glass teeth to transform the root into the cat. In the exhibit, the cat will be looking at a bird sculpture and the bird will be looking at several bugs scattered over the wall.
“It’s going to be a whole ecosystem,” Bohn said.
Bohn studied art at the University of North Texas, where she double majored in sculpture and art education. She taught herself how to make stained glass after a friend introduced her to it in 1994. The idea to combine stained glass artwork with roots wasn’t until she and her family moved to the Ozarks, and the first root and glass sculpture was made in 2001.
Courtesy Photo
Cheri Bohn’s bird of prey sculpture is a good example of her technique of combining stained glass with found tree roots.
In addition to the root sculptures, Bohn also makes a variety of stained glass lamps, including one of Star Wars’ R2-D2.
Bohn is self-admittedly a sci-fi and fantasy fan. Many of her sculptures and stained-glass works feature characters and symbols from Star Trek, The Matrix, Star Wars and Transformers, as well as dragons and other mythical creatures.
“I love science fiction, time travel, just all of it,” she said. “I grew up a 70s child, so I’m a Star Wars fan. I used to dress up like Princess Leia.”
