Abstract | Artist Statement | Image Gallery | Home| Close Portfolio (and return to SMP index)

Abstract

Katherine Cooper

Much of our human experience is based upon a negation of the bodily: a desire to erase markers of age and attributes of our physicality that are beyond our control. We don't like to think of ourselves as being merely animals, subject to the same repeated processes of generation, reproduction and death inherent to all bodies. The traditional idea of sculpture as monumental is an expression of this desire to negate the body. Monumentality is defined as "having the quality of being larger than life." (Webster's Dictionary) It also implies permanence; something that is immutable and unchanging. My work addresses this impossibility; as much as we may toil nothing is larger than life itself, we cannot outlive our bodies, nor can we bypass the processes of generation, reproduction, and maturation inherent in all life forms. The generation that is part of my process becomes the subject of my work as the act of creation in making art mimics the flux of birth and death. The materials that I use allude to the human body and amplify the notion of impermanence that is ultimately connected with any form of life. By choosing neutral materials structured using simple steel frames, I hope to express the idea of generation, an idea that is both central to my process and the content of my work. These works defy traditional ideas of monumentality in their softness, human scale, lack of representational elements, and impermanence and yet I feel that the images they convey are worth recognizing as the only true universal, our physical bodies. Thus, the recognition implicit in such forms is a kind of new monumentality, a homage to human nature.