Sharon Louden is best known for room-size, site-specific installations constructed from thousands of small components. She uses a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation, aiming to capture movement and light. Within these works, industrial materials (her favorite is aluminum) are transformed into something more closely resembling forms in nature, even the human body. She calls her abstract creations “anthropomorphic individuals,” acknowledging the human-like aspects that result from minimal lines, textures, and gestures. The editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists and The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, Louden wears many hats—artist, advocate, and educator (she has taught for more than 25 years). Though she started her artistic career as a painter at Yale, over time, she became bored with the limitations of canvas: “I wanted to paint the inside of figures and dissect them. I would think of them as architecture.” …see the entire article in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
