Special Edition Post - Barbara Cooper

Barbara Cooper is a sculpture artist. One thing she emphasized the most was her strong connection with nature. She cares for the growth of nature and its role in the environment. She finds a lot of interest in abstraction of nature, how it was distorted through uncontrollable circumstances, such as a tornado hitting a forest. She takes irregular patterns and transforms them into something different without losing its essence of where it came from. This is her way of taking organic trash and giving it life again.

She focuses on erosion, how the variant shapes and lines were formed or essentially distorted or destroyed by a naturalistic phenomena.

The first two photos on top are an example of her using organic trash to make a nature related sculpture. The wood itself is incredibly thin but she didn't want to worry about that because she wasn't trying to put her entire focus on the flexibility of the wood but its strength, which is why her pieces primarily consists of layers upon layers upon layers, which emphasizes that strength. It almost seems like something that belongs in nature because it seems as though the work itself was developing almost a "tree tumor" but it's clearly manipulated by the artist.

The Bottom two photos are her showcasing this idea of 2-D implying 3-Dimensionality. The second to last photo is known as her contour map. It is map that she drew on because she wanted to give it a sense that a place with such an irregular pattern existed. She used something I believed was called walnut ink to add those ripple patterns on that map. Same goes for the bottom photo, using irregular lines to create depth and 3-Dimensionality.

Barbara was really interesting to listen to not because she was an artist but because she was interested in irregular patterns. She examines a wide range of patterns and incorporates these ideas into an naturalistic sculpture. It's steps further from clay sculpture. Her method definitely conveys this idea of reparation, almost considering the feelings of the art and the viewer.