On the Cover:
Deborah Butterfield, Storm Castle, 2012. Cast bronze with patina, 99.5 x 115 x 88.5 in. Photo: Walla Walla Foundry, © 2022 Deborah Butterfield / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Editor’s Letter:
Deborah Butterfield received the International Sculpture Center’s 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award for her extraordinary sculptural depictions of horses. In a sense, she sees us in them, since we are all Gaia’s children. It’s a sentiment that pervades the work of every artist featured in this issue. Alice Momm’s ephemeral works, composed of mostly natural materials that she finds on walks, derive from “looking at what’s forgotten, in resurrecting stories from extinction and honoring the small and unnoticed.” In installations and sculptures that explore, in part, what lies beneath the ground we walk on, Cristina Iglesias celebrates the hidden and the seen of the natural world. “I think constantly about our vulnerability and the possibility that our destiny could return us to stone atop this spinning rock,” says Dawn DeDeaux, whose recent videos and sculptures reference climate change. And, while Connie Zehr is best known for temporary pieces in silica sand, her work always engages with what her interviewer, Joyce Beckenstein, calls “the evanescence of life and the wonder of experiencing it as human specks swept up in nature’s grand cycles.” If nature has been less the focus of art at a time obsessed with a post-human future, it seems from these wonderful artists that the wheel is turning. —Daniel Kunitz
