Chicago
In an age when creating the next new thing is pervasive, Barbara Cooper, a Chicago-based sculptor, offers a refreshing take on art, with nature as her starting point. Rather than compete with nature, she evoked its depths by using repurposed materials in her recent exhibition, “Repurposing: Small Sculpture.” The results were striking. Cooper, who has worked with wood veneer since the late 1980s, “finds the world of nature to be one that creates a sense of awe…it provides a model of how to be in the world.” Her sculptures, with their repurposed materials, not only incorporate themes of growth and decay, development and transformation, they also echo those themes back to the viewer, underscoring how natural processes underpin human life. …see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
