Carol Hepper :: Untitled

Carol Hepper grew up on a ranch on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which straddles a large area of north-central South Dakota and south-central North Dakota. She came to prominence creating sculptures made of natural materials—wood, deer hide, bone—that eflected the place from which she had come. Her work responds to the popularity of minimalist sculpture; a teacher from South Dakota State University who was also a Joseph Beuys devotee encouraged her to work with non-mainstream materials. “Ultimately,” she says, “I guess I’m working in the area where nature and culture meet, with the alchemy that results when ideas and matter mix.” Her small sculpture in this exhibition is indicative of the ideas she has worked with in many others: the fragile balance between life and death, and the relationship between the organic and inorganic, harmony and chaos, external and internal, the natural and the manufactured.