PERPENDICULAR TO THE FORCE OF GRAVITY

New Works by Beverly Penn

to Open October 21

at William Campbell Contemporary Art

 

 

"Our relationship with the natural world is increasingly in turmoil," says Penn. Her plant-based bronzes reflect this idea in their precise, idealized patterns and patinas that cleanly fill a prescribed space, all the while harboring a latent energy.

Penn's sculptures hang on the wall like vertical landscapes, visually mapping the space they occupy and presenting the viewer with a complex array of ornate lines and textures that call attention to the beauty of natural forms, both inherent and manipulated. The artist describes their meandering patterns as analogous to the rhizomatic structures present in the weeds and other invasive plants informing her work. Like these underground growth systems, the bronze leaves and tendrils reach out in all directions: expansive, multiaxial, and perpendicular to gravity. The resultant sprawl evokes a controlled chaos-nonlinear, complex pathways meticulously arranged and contorted to serve a specific aesthetic purpose.

 

                                                                                                                 

Penn employs a centrifugal casting process, which uses the force of intense outward motion to spin bronze into the negative space remaining after the plants disintegrate during firing. 

Often found in the jewelry industry, this method is most effective for the small pieces she works with, as it retains the intricate details in every component, while also giving the artist broad range to configure the final sculpture. Penn designs as she goes, soldering individual plant segments together only after responding to each on its own. "Each one has a different mark that it makes and a different line that it forms," she says.

 

Ultimately, Penn's bronzes become a type of memorial to the lost plant-and to the wider concerns of climate change and the memory of such natural elements already lost. Penn says, "The notion of a memorial, especially as it refers to loss and remembrance, is significant in times of irreversible climate change and extinction. Yet a memorial also links us to desire so it is equally hopeful, because it is in the idealized natural spaces that we cultivate in our imagination and in our world that our best intentions thrive, flourish, and proliferate."

For more than twenty years, 

award-winning Austin artist 

Beverly Penn has exhibited

 

Penn's work has appeared in such publications as Art in America, Artlies, Metalsmith, the New Art Examiner, Sculpture magazine , the New Orleans Art Review. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy; a Connemara Conservancy Artist Grant; grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts; and a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona, Spain. The Texas Legislature and Texas Commission on the Arts recently named Penn the State of Texas 3D Artist for 2017.

 

Penn's sculptures are included in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Austin Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She has been commissioned for several public art projects, including Unity in Diversity in Las Cruces, New Mexico; the Community Core Sample Project and the Threshold Project with Steve Wiman in Austin; and the  Carté Hilton Hotel in San Diego.

 

Beverly Penn earned her MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz, her MA from New Mexico State University, and her BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso. She currently serves as a tenured professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University in San Marcos.