Sharon Loper

Sharon Loper: A Kind of Radiance
essay by John Grande, poet

Sharon Loper’s art intuitively motivates us to regard our place in a universe, whether it is the sculptures of animals she has created, or the bronze of men and women, or the allusions to forms in nature, such as the tree, or the bird’s nest. Her sculpture installations bring together a range of works, and are conceived as a total work. The individual bronze sculptures in these exhibition works build a natural flow, become an exchange of inter-cultural visions between the various bird, animal and human subjects that Loper captures so expressively. The space between becomes the metaphor, the environmental bond that actualizes, and catalyzes this inter-relation of species. Sharon Loper’s art is not just about the physical dimension. Her concerns are spiritual, anthropological and catch what the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire once called, “(…) a suggestive magic which simultaneously contains object and subject, the world outside the artist, and the artist (herself).”

We can think of the spiritual as an essence, for Sharon Loper, materials become a medium for expressing a deeper integrity of experience captured in subjects as varied as Orion, the Number 9, Midnight, Dreamtime or Picasso’s Cat. If we dream, it is because the world captures our spirit, and while imagery makes us like magpies insatiably ‘reading’ visual, auditory and informational effects, we can miss the “content” that is the tactile, physical world we are a part of. Sharon Loper’s art reminds us of our connectedness to things, to other living species, to what it feels like to be human. Her art is less about the shock of the new, than it is about getting to a place where memory and feeling coalesce, and so her art expresses the individual’s experience, plain and simple.

Living forms in nature vary far more, and have greater diversity than all the art humanity has ever created. Change is manifest in the texture and erosion of all things. Experience is part of the material world that inspires it. And Sharon Loper’s art reflects something of that ever-moving experience, but always tentatively, with a certain questioning of what representation really is, either in sculpture or in two dimensions. The flux and flow of energies that surround us are immeasurable but they are based on the physical essence, and the limits to materials. The limits imposed on us by nature are guiding us to establish a new global ethic that involves the mutual respect between all living things. Sharon Loper’s art draws upon this flow of energies that is part of the process of life, the procreative core of our need to transform, enrich, express. As she says, “I think of my art as landscapes of thought based on organic principles” Materials are simply a medium for expression and the manifestation of an idea, a presence, a scene.”

Over the years, Sharon Loper has produced a body of commissions, sculptures, artworks that tell a very human story of our memory, our ancestral memory of a place in nature, a context of nature, of which we are a part. These sculptures tell a story of all time, and remind us that universality is not merely a reinforcement of effects, but reflects certain unassailable truths about the human condition. Widely recognized for her sculpture, Sharon Loper has contributed sculptures to exhibitions, and received public commissions that reflect her passion and intense interest in nature. The commissions include the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the San Diego Children’s Hospital, and the Los Angeles Zoo. Exhibitions in sculpture gardens and museums include the Triton Museum of Art, the Skokie Northshore Sculpture Park, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey, the Museum Katten Kabinet in Amsterdam, Holland and most recently the Museum Villa Haiss in Berlin.

Animals are quirky, mercurial, vulnerable living things. We are so closely connected to that world. Loper’s sculptures of animals, whether wolf, horse, bird or cat, hold our attention precisely because they are poetic, and have a naturalistic sense of the way animals move, stand, sit. She has an acute sense of observation and applies it to her art with great dexterity. Invited to participate in Dreamworks, a traveling show that went to New York, Vienna, and Paris in 2000, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Sharon Loper presented Dreamtime, a bronze sculpture of a contented and reclining cat. The sculpture references Australian Aboriginal time of creation. In their mythology dreamtime is a place where one goes to, a world of illusion or fantasy where one’s desired wishes can be realized. In Animal Spirits; How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, the authors suggests that it is, ”The thought patterns that animate people’s spirits and feelings”. What links us to the natural world, is in part, the way our animal spirits influence our so-called “rational” behavior. By getting in touch with our anima side, we realize our behavior (for all its apparent indomitable sense of pragmatic destiny) is ruled by invisible forces, that is, like nature, an unconscious back drop to what makes us human. Sharon Loper’s fascination in the cross-over between the human and animal worlds is central to her art, so much so that for her latest project, Loper approaches animal as subject, and perception as way of understanding. The gorilla is part of the pantheon of life we are a part of – thought and matter context - it is a miracle we communicate at all between species. Sharon Loper’s gorilla is presented in a minimal way is presented in a tactile mutable form. This is not about realism at all, instead about intuited form, and the intention of the artist is to express something of that interspecies communication. Her focus is partly on the diverse ways different species, in this case gorillas and primates, actually perceive the world differently. And so this is about and exchange of visions. Impermanent creatures of light, we communicate our brief lives between species and each other, Loper’s art seems to say. Body language and stance is central to Sharon Loper’s sculpture. Clio exhibited at Northshore Sculpture Park in Chicago, Illinois in 1999, has an aura of tendentious anticipation, of a person seeking to communicate but who is also very fragile. With Interior #5 Isolation, exhibited at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey in 2005, she sculpted a woman in a kneeling stance. She looks partly vulnerable, and she may be in the process of protecting herself. The bodily surfaces of this sculpture have a tactile, painterly feel, enhanced by the spatula markings as if the body were immaterial. Interior #5 Isolation becomes a portrait that focuses on the fleeting illusionary character of life itself. As sculpture this evidences Loper’s studied understanding of personal body language.

The space between the objects, the sculpture the solar etchings, in the exhibition Anima tell us a great deal about the artist’s intent as an interpreter of the human’s condition. Beset by our beginnings, we each express these differently, and our persona reflects that. For Anima that experience has led to an expressionist tendency to surface, and it is not an expression of the individual, more of the human’s condition, their insatiable curiosity and the inevitable limitations to our nature. An energy permeates the atmosphere and transfers from object to object, sculpture to sculpture, -the common denominator is a universal commonality between all these gestural sculptural personalities whether animal or human, And so all this art is about our place in the universe, which is as human, with our intricate simplicity, and hereditary viewpoints, part genetic, part learned. Loper’s paintbrush is a basic consciousness, and her material media is a consummate language, that expresses a personal collective vision, a contemplative sculptor. And so with an expressive flair, Loper builds a language out of her vision that is not realist per se, although allusions exist in the sculptural presences she creates. As Jacob Bronowski has written in Science and Human Values, “(…) the great artist works as devotedly to uncover the implications of his (or her) vision as does the great scientist. They grow, they haunt (the artist’s) thought, and their most inspired flash is the end of a lifetime of silent exploration.” Sharon Loper is less interested in the material result or final end point of art but instead integrates her knowledge and experience in to a process-oriented art that is less about the materials she uses, and less about the impact, or even the historical contextualizing of a brief notion that is that of contemporaneity, but instead she looks beyond the art world, integrating the lessons of history to tell a story, a narrative of sorts. The Sanctuary exhibited at the Triton Museum of Art in 2001, is contemplative, and expresses something about our need for a place to go, far from the madding crowd, where we can heal ourselves, and feel the beingness of life. How do we find our sanctuary in such a speeded up world, so far from our origins in nature? Sharon Loper’s installation captures a very special spirit of place. Interspecies communication is manifest in the assemblage of bronzes in The Sanctuary. These bronze sculptures are to be seen together as one entity and include a man and a woman, three ravens, and two wolves. Eclectic, variable and introspective, this is a work that proclaims nature’s place in our lives and does so with an aura of mystery. The raven, like the wolf, is a social creature, and they have sophisticated powers of communication, and a language that is quite evolved. Combined as they are with the human couple, they form a quiet bond of species who, each in their own way, are bound to a collective cultural modus vivendi. Two large bronze figures of a man and a woman stand as if at random, and next to them looking on we can see wolves, and interspersed into the scene are ravens. The Solar (2000) series of etchings, achieved by using the sun’s light to etch in place of harmful acids, express an affinity to nature, and that of trees whom communicate their presence to the surrounding sculptures. Using chine colle and ink drawing with stencils to arrive at each composition, Loper invites us to go beyond the simplistic tree symbol, and instead to see these as metaphorical spirit forms. The tree images encircle the sculpture, and bring some contextual relation to the assemblage of figures. These figures have a persona or presence that moves beyond traditional notions of art as object and towards the more classical. Sculptors whose art shares an affinity with Sharon Loper’s art include Reg Butler, Marino Marini, Alberto Giacometti and Elizabeth Frink.

Sharon Loper’s way of building a sculpture is additive, involved building layers of clay, using wood blocks and burlap to effectively “shape” each sculpture, as well as drawing lines on the surfaces. Surface textual effects including Loper’s finger prints, and she believes the sounds of music played during creation leave their traces on each piece. In this way Loper’s process builds surface textures into the persona that are then cast in bronze using the lost wax method. We are reminded of Kathe Kollwitz’s figures. Above all it is the human figure and its isolation despite the crowds of people, the living beings. Her expression involves an honest, open dialogue with self and other. Each living sculpture is part of a greater entity, and they are bodies, part of the ever changing collective unconscious… This theme emerges throughout Loper’s art. Each bronze references a greater consciousness through its very individuation and we are reminded of the way the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch thematically would integrate isolated elements - a man, a woman, and the field of sky, or a nearby crowd. Collectively they would represent an inner and also an outer (psychic) reality. This bridge builds an inner and outer dialogue. Sharon Loper’s sculptures have a simple textural surface, a three dimensionality, and their life plays on emptiness and bringing a fiery spirit to each of them. The spirit can be presence or it can be absence. And so Loper’s sculptures embody an idea of persona, of the individual as a personification of some greater commonality or that which makes us human, and that which make other species (in the case of Loper’s animals) that which makes them part of a great diversity and chorus of life. The surprising thing with all of this is that we communicate between species, and between each other. This is something of a miracle of consciousness we often take for granted. We as spectators may not always find these sculptors easy to appreciate but we can empathize, sense the pain. It touches us palpably, as if we were entering into these scenes ourselves as part of the art. In 2007 Loper presented her first nests at the (MAH) Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California. With two real hummingbird nests on view that were an inspiration for Loper, the show presented large-scale nests that involved gathering materials, weaving, and bringing them together into the nest form. A multi-media work called Passage presented four pixilated photographs of hummingbirds under Plexiglas suspended above the gallery floor. Passage further animated the exhibition’s theme. As Loper comments, “The nest represents nature in its most perfect symbolism, in that the nest is a shelter, an enclosure, a safe place where life is sustained. We all live in a time when hyper-reality is the norm. The nest brings us back to less complicated values and uses nature as a vehicle. The nest is a window, a place where life begins.” 4 The following year, in 2008, Sharon Loper produced a nest sculpture for an exhibition at the Royal Botanical Gardens in 2008. The nest sculpture recreated the hummingbird’s nest that first inspired the artist in 2003. Materials for the sculpture included steel, wire armature, sisal fiber, raw cotton and the nests size, like those exhibited at the California’s Museum of Art and History (MAH) in 2007. These sculptural recreations varied from over 20 to 40 times the size of an actual hummingbird’s nest. And the nest is a metaphor for a place of security. For humans just like birds, we need a private nest-like place. For many of us, the making of and appreciation of art has become that place. Sharon Loper brings that great place we are in - the universe - to us with care, expression, vision. Here is the spirit in nature the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof wrote of in the poem Trolldom in Fall,

“Be still, be silent and wait,
Wait for the animal, wait for the sign that is coming,
Wait for the miracle, wait for the defeat that is coming,
When time has lost its saltiness.
It soars with dead stars past burning skerries.
It arrives in dawn or dusk.
Day and night are not its time.”