Sharon Loper Anima SCAPE Exhibition

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Sharon Loper Exhibition
Anima (a' ni-ma) (Souls/Spirits)
Prepared by Miki Yoshimoto


Anima explores familiar and basic forms using traditional approaches to art making in which the animate and the inanimate coexist on equal grounds.

The artist presents the prints and sculptural pieces as she experienced them at a certain moment in time in her life. Thus a tree, a house and a female anima boldly represent who and what they are. These elements within the gallery space become building blocks of the artists own language which is best understood by erasing the boundary between viewer and object entering a phenomenal world. With each added layer in the Chine Colle prints and the application of clay in the sculpture, the artist breathes life into her subjects as in the first encounter.

Stark, with minimal details, the Chine Colle etchings of the Tree and the Irish House float like silhouettes suspended in a fluid dreamtime. Etched on top of thin sheets of gold and silver funerary money, both tree and house exist in a cyclical time in which life and death are synonymous and mourning coexists with celebration. The Chine Colle technique has been aptly chosen for these subjects in which multiple layers of images and shapes are superimposed like fragments piecing together a single memory � each step is significant, every mark intentional. The visceral, raw finish transforms them into animate, living beings.

The life-size female anima is cast in bronze with hand-blown antique glass prosthetic eyes. Part self-portrait, part illusion, she contemplates the universe within. The reflective surface of the eyes provide a window into the soul, animating her from within.

Together, the three entities illuminate humanistic values of home, shelter and the root of all life. It is an idealistic landscape in which all beings, animate and inanimate evolve in unison towards an inevitable fate: in the end, everything returns to the earth where all life begins.



© Sharon Loper 2024