South County artist Wendy Wahl stands in her installation, Uncovered Grove, at the Newport Art Museum.

NEWPORT Growing up, Wendy Wahl remembers using the Encyclopedia Britannica to gather information for her school papers and homework.

“It was the place to go when you really needed an in-depth explanation or analysis,” she says. “Some of the entries went on for pages and pages.”

Nowadays, Wahl, a South County artist who specializes in all-natural materials such as paper and fabric, is more likely to do her research online. But in Uncovered Grove, a room-filling installation at the Newport Art Museum, Wahl has found a new use for old encyclopedias: turn them into art.

The installation, which runs through Feb. 3, consists of more than 50,000 pages that Wahl carefully removed from a 1979 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. She then used the pages to create a miniature forest, complete with 8-foot-high paper trees and a lush carpet of paper leaves.

“Paper is such a great material to work with,” Wahl said during a tour of the installation last week. “For one thing, everybody is familiar with it. There’s no getting-acquainted period with paper. You don’t need to tell people what it is. You see it and you instantly know what you’re looking at.”

She continued: “Paper is also extremely tactile. It’s almost impossible to see it and not want to touch it, which isn’t surprising since most paper is made to be touched in the form of books, newspapers and magazines. It’s also remarkably tough for something that looks and feels so lightweight.”

Wahl said that working on Uncovered Grove has made her appreciate that toughness even more. Though the installation has been on display since November — and though visitors are encouraged to stir up the paper “leaves” as much as they like — the work has so far held up pretty well.

“Basically, it’s maintenance-free,” she said. “I wish everything I did was like that.”

Fans of Wahl’s previous work may be surprised at the size of Uncovered Grove, which fills a small gallery near the museum’s main entrance. A graduate of the University of California and the Rhode Island School of Design, Wahl is known for her small, finely crafted sculptures and mixed-media pieces. Creating a room-sized installation like Uncovered Grove, she said, represented a new challenge.

“It was fun but it was also exhausting,” she said. “A lot of my work is very labor-intensive, so the process of actually taking apart the encyclopedias and building the installation wasn’t a problem. But making sure the piece fit the space and looked the way I wanted it to look, that was scary.”

Wahl, who will discuss her work today at 2 p.m. at the museum, said she began thinking about working on a larger scale last year, after participating in “Not Quite Natural,” a multi-artist exhibit at the private Wheeler School, in Providence.

She said the show, which explored the relationship between nature and culture, prompted her to explore her own anxieties about global warming and other environmental problems. The result was Stand for Knowledge, an installation that consisted of a series of branch-like columns made from hundreds of sheets of paper.

Looking back, Wahl said she was happy with Stand for Knowledge, which in many ways served as a trial run for Uncovered Grove. Still, there was one glaring problem: “It really needed to be bigger,” she said.

The chance to work on a larger stage came a few months later, when the Newport Art Museum offered Wahl a solo exhibition. Wahl said she immediately began making plans for a larger version of Stand for Knowledge — this time using an old set of encyclopedias as her raw material.

“I really like the traditional idea of the ‘tree of knowledge,’ the sense that human knowledge is somehow grounded in the natural world,” she said. “That’s so different from the way we use knowledge today. Today, so much of the knowledge and technology that we have is used to exploit nature.”

Wahl also liked the idea of using paper — a material that comes from trees — to create her own faux forest. “I like to think of it as a kind of creative recycling,” she said.

At the same time, Wahl wanted the installation to be fun and engaging for museum-goers of all ages. That meant making the entire exhibit interactive, meaning that visitors are free to poke and prod the paper “trees,” which respond by bending and swaying just like real trees. They can also walk or shuffle through the installation’s paper “leaves,” an experience akin to wading through a pile of real leaves.

Wahl said she knew that Uncovered Grove was a success when she saw children romping through the installation on opening night.

“They were obviously having a lot of fun,” she said. “That felt really good.”

“Uncovered Grove: An Installation by Wendy Wahl” runs through Feb. 3 at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Ave. Hours: Mon.-Sat. 10-4 and Sun. noon-4. Admission: adults $6, seniors $5, students and military personnel with ID $4, children 5 and under free. Contact: (401) 848-8200 or www.newportartmuseum.org .Want to know more?

Artist Wendy Wahl will discuss her work today at 2 p.m. at the Newport Art Museum.

bvansicl@projo.com