Karen McCoy started her project from the ground up – literally.

The NIU Art Museum held a public reception Sunday at 231 E. Lincoln Highway, for The DeKalb County Farmland Project, a project focused on the soil of DeKalb County, as well as the effect of local development on the farmland.

“The issue here is really the soil,” Karen McCoy, the project artist and NIU alumna said. “That’s my starting point.”

McCoy worked on the project for a year and a half after the museum asked her to do it, she said.

McCoy researched local farming and agricultural issues, and interviewed DeKalb County farmers for the project.

“These farmers are wonderful,” she said. “The problem is they inherited the current system.”

The current system McCoy referred to is the contemporary farming methods most farmers use.

These methods include using annual versus perennial grains and polyculture versus monoculture.

Society made a wrong turn 8,000 years ago, McCoy said. Instead of choosing polycultural farming methods, where more than one type of crop is planted in a particular area, only one crop is planted in a given field.

This does not allow the land to sustain itself like it would in a polycultural system, McCoy said.

The exhibit, called “And you must always begin from the ground,” named after a sample of a poem written by Gunnar Ekelof, included local samples of soil and a sculpture of rows of dirt with square blocks of pressed dirt.

Melanie Scott, a graduate assistant at the NIU Art Museum, helped form the pressed dirt for the project.

“It turned out aesthetically nice,” Scott said.

The walls of the exhibit were painted with dirt from a pit found on NIU’s campus. Quotes from various individuals commenting on farming are scattered on the walls.

The exhibit also includes a video of interviews that McCoy conducted with DeKalb County farmers called “Conversations about DeKalb.”

“The video, in particular, educates the community about the importance of the land,” said Ken Bowden, a former NIU geology professor who attended the reception. “We often forget about how important the farmland is.”