ARTIST ANNA HEPLER
INTERVIEW WITH CONTEMPORARY ARTIST ANNA HEPLER
To end this very difficult and challenging year we focused on finding the artists that truly inspired and uplifted us with their work and creativity. American contemporary artist Anna Hepler is one of those, her insanely beautiful sculptures and installation have been exhibited all over the world and she is well known for her curiosity and for being an innovator.
Anna please tell us a bit about yourself, career highlights, where you currently live and work?
I come from a family of botanists, and beekeepers who structured their lives around the unpredictable movements and challenges of the natural world. This life, collaborating explicitly with forces beyond one's control, establishes a dynamic of flexibility and acceptance, or respect for the unknown. It is this same dynamic that drives and guides my work. It is within this philosophical framework I feel connected to past generations. I grew up in western Massachusetts and am based there now with a studio in Greenfield, however I have spent most of my adult life living in Maine, both in Portland, and on Moose island. I miss that rugged coast.
My work is ever evolving, each present moment eroding the memory of past projects such that I do not feel a sense of accomplishment in the studio, only the struggle of making new work over and over. This struggle does not change. In this way I am always a beginner, unstable on my feet, without a clear path forward.
The origin of my work is in printmaking and still I feel those threads connecting to my recent sculpture. More specifically, the manipulation of material such as carving a woodblock or scratching a dry point plate, then inking and translating the image onto paper -- a print! -- shows how one material can paradoxically reveal itself in a completely new form. Which is the more interesting thing? The final print? the block? It is with the awareness of how each material holds the potential to be transformed that my work remains rooted in printmaking, like a subject and it's shadow. I am just as interested in the shadow as I am in the object... perhaps it is the shadow I seek.
your greatest inspirations or influences?
My greatest inspiration is in folk art and craft traditions. I love to know how things are made -- it is a kind of superpower -- and I love the generosity of making objects, or useful things as gifts, or as a talisman. This is my root as a maker, but as I get older and have slowly gained in confidence, I trust the silent and mysterious parts of myself to speak. From here emerge many works that I cannot always understand or describe, but I trust them. The impulse is still rooted in a kind of craft, but the process feels very disobedient to craft - untrained and serendipitous. I am intrigued to work because I think with my hands, and find solace, and curiosity when I am absorbed in the moment. This is my preferred way to be alive.
Here are the names of some artists I love: Arlene Shechet, Martin Puryear, Jean Pierre Pincemin, Norbert Prangenberg, Phyllida Barlow, Alexander Calder
Tell us a bit about your creative process? Work you are most proud of, things you are looking forward to in 2021?
The opportunities I look forward to most are those that offer a chance to work. As I write this, I am a resident at the Ellis-Beaurgeard Foundation for one month in Rockland, Maine, and I'm looking forward to another residency late Spring at the Montello Foundation, in NE Nevada. But I have children, and other obligations, so I fall in and out of these saturated work periods, sometimes months go by and I make nothing.
I feel most gratified by any project tempered with serendipity, as though being an artist is like being a medium for forces beyond our control, or like a form of divination. I sometimes feel uncomfortable claiming authorship of work that comes into being so unexpectedly, as though it were a true collaboration with unknown forces -- and it is! Often the larger architectural scaled projects have this magic about them, when all my physical effort is expended by the scale, and labor. Sometimes I think the work is better in those moments when control is lost.
How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the art industry changing moving forward?
I have been necessarily impacted by the intense brutality of injustice and inequality in the U.S., and have spent many months this past year taking action outside of the studio. It seems the only thing to do, and still the only way to behave against so much violence.
