Barbara Cooper, re:Growth

Barbara Cooper, re:Growth, another publication in conjunction with the exhibition produced by Bellevue Arts Museum, is a fully illustrated catalog featuring a dozen of the artist's most daring sculptures and mesmerizing drawings that highlights Cooper's trajectory in the last decade. Her marred and twisted trunk-like forms are iconic and powerful; for their very existence addresses both the resilience of nature and the regenerative power of art. The Chicago-based conceptual artist writes, "I wanted to mirror the efficiency I find in nature by recycling waste product into a new generation of form." Her life size wood sculptures stresses the natural and organic yet the basis of Cooper's pieces are built upon layers and layers of common man made materials such as wood glue and scraps of factory wood veneer. Crafted through the repetitive process of amassing by slowly layering these materials, Barbara Cooper's works are imbued with the very time the artist invested in their creation: as in nature, time is the literal and metaphorical measure for growth and re-growth in new directions. The catalog include images of Cooper's sculptures with titles such as Surge, Span, and Mast, which conveys the sense of a constant state of change and out-reaching growth.