Bloomington sculptor reaches ‘punctuation point’ with her latest exhibition

Source: Limestone Post

With her life-size statue of Alfred C. Kinsey a firmly established fixture on Indiana University Bloomington’s campus, two major commissions in the works and an upcoming summer in France, Melanie Cooper Pennington considers her recent exhibition at Bloomington’s I Fell Gallery a punctuation point in her continually evolving career.

A veteran of many one-person exhibitions, Cooper Pennington, a sculpture professor at IU’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, says this one is different. 

“This is a punctuation point in many ways for me, because I’m showcasing my drawings for the first time,” she says. “I’m showing work that’s been created all in one year, so it feels very much like a coherent body of work. It’s very specifically about the snake form and the beast form.” 

Shred My Skin, the show’s title, is “a play on the shedding of the skin of a snake,” she explains. “You’ll find a snake motif in almost every piece in the show. I visited Italy two years ago and fell in love, particularly, with the marble snake carvings.”

Observing Cooper Pennington talk feels like watching one of her sculptures come to life. She alternately stretches or scrunches her body to illustrate a point. She hunches her shoulders, draws up her knees, bends inward to her core. Her hands and arms dance a counterpoint to her words. 

Parsing those words reveals the depth of creative thought that permeates her work. Every form, every line, every color or texture emerges from a deeply felt idea she needs to communicate. Among other ideas, her explanation of this exhibition prompts a reevaluation of one’s feelings about snakes.

“One of the things I’ve been playing with in the work — and, of course, the work is always a reflection of personal growth and thought — is the awareness of how fear and desire are often the same,” she says. “We are afraid of things we long for — the power that they hold. But we also have desires. And I don’t see desire as bad but as a tool for self-reflection and discovery.”

Her new work is an attempt to balance those competing elements. It also makes an argument against the fundamentalist religion Cooper Pennington was raised in. “I don’t like the fact that the snake is often used negatively, especially in the Christian tradition, as the sign of evil or that female sexuality is bad,” she says. “So, I’m pushing back and making room for female sexuality and desire.”

“I’m experimenting with new materials,” she says of the installation work that is central to the space. The piece, Use Your Words, is an abstraction morphing human anatomy with the legs and hooves of horses. Fabricated on an armature of steel and layered with foam, fiberglass, and resin, it stands 10 feet high and stretches 12 feet by 16 feet. A base of crushed salt and a three-dimensional drawing done with thick grapevines expand the piece to dominate the I Fell Gallery space. 

The vines are found objects, culled from the woods behind Cooper Pennington’s house. Their spontaneous arrangement done intuitively in a few hours contrasts with the thoughtful, studied central piece, created over months. The vines have personal and environmental significance. Invasive oriental bittersweet vines mix with native grapevines and are slowly strangling the trees behind her house.

“The vines dance beautifully in the forest and remind me of snakes, but there is always a tension — the oriental bittersweet is an invasive and is overtaking the forest,” she says. “So, the vines carry a tension between something beautiful but also threatening. … I thought they would work well as a three-dimensional line in the space that referenced the snake imagery.”

Like the lines in her two-dimensional drawings, some of the vines are thicker, some thinner, some darker, some lighter, but all have a serpentine quality, and they alternately embrace or constrict the beast form. 

The work’s title adds a gender-political dimension. Cooper Pennington sees the central figures as male wrestlers. “Use Your Words,” she adds. “That’s my constant desire for the world, that we stop wrestling and learn to communicate with each other. That we learn how to work together and talk together. Not just fight over shiny things.”

She draws on vinyl because its porous texture feels like skin. Pastel lets her build up her drawings in layers, which again holds conceptual significance. “There’s a lot of layers in the drawings, which to me represents the multiple layers we hold inside ourselves,” she says. 

“I have a part that’s often very vulnerable and shy and scared,” she says. “And then I have a part that feels like Wonder Woman and she’s ready to take down the world and wants to fight and put on the boxing gloves. And then I’ve got the diplomat, who’s going to work hard to communicate peacefully and bring people together. And I’ve got the teacher. So, I’m referencing all the different parts that we have in one’s self.”

Cooper Pennington sees comfort in several small pieces that show women embracing and being embraced by snakes as if with a feather boa or a soft blanket. A snake is “an animal that can embrace fluidly every part of a surface or a body and wrap around it,” she says. “And, of course, the circle is also comfort, and snakes thrive in this kind of circular gesture.” Acknowledging that some snakes do pose danger, she adds, “that tension is what I’m playing with.” 

There is also a formal dimension. “I’ve really enjoyed having a fluid line that I can play with, that is contrary to” the sharp, angular hoofs and legs of her beast forms, she says, chopping her arms to demonstrate those angles. “It gives me more things to play with in terms of line and form.”

Cooper Pennington’s colleague Angela Caldwell is impressed by “her new choice of materials, the soft fiber — leather and vinyl.” Caldwell, who teaches metalsmithing and jewelry design at Eskenazi, maintains a studio just off the I Fell Gallery, so she has only to open her door to see the new work. “It’s always interesting to stand back and watch visitors view and interact with a new exhibition,” she says of the crowd at the First Friday opening. She notes particularly their responses to the scale and color of Cooper Pennington’s large drawings. “I wasn’t disappointed,” she says of their reactions.

At the opening, Cooper Pennington extended her snake theme into small details. She wore faux snakeskin shoes and a sculpted epoxy snake necklace she had created. In a touch of humor, the food table featured snake-like gummies.  

Some artists build their entire career around a single motif, medium, and style. Others, like Picasso with his many periods, constantly evolve, grow, experiment. Movement has always been essential to Cooper Pennington’s physical well-being and her art. From drawing in high school and discovering clay in college, she moved on after college to study figure sculpture and portrait busts in the Frederick Remington tradition. During her MFA studies at IU, she progressed to monumental abstractions, many with sexual overtones. Covid prompted her to return to drawing, working out ideas for small-scale sculptures.

Post-pandemic, a summer in Rome and Florence, Italy, reminded her of the joy of being an artist. “I think being in that culture — it was so lovely to be around people who obviously respect art deeply,” she says. It also helped her appreciate the serpent motif in Italian marbles and led to her current integration of two- and three-dimensional works. 

The Italian humanist tradition pointed her away from the Judeo-Christian myth of the snake as Satan, tempting Eve to bring sin into the world. Instead, “I like the story of Medusa,” she says, clapping her hands and laughing. “The injustice done to Medusa. And her way of fighting back by turning people to stone.” 

This summer she travels to France to study such artists as Auguste Rodin and Constantin Brancusi. All the while, churning in her subconscious will be ideas for two new commissions. 

With a résumé of successes during more than 30 years of artistic growth, Cooper Pennington continues to develop her art with new materials, motifs, and ideas.

“We’ll see,” she says of her continuing trajectory. “We’ll see where it goes. I’m happiest when I am creating, and, I hope, like my hero Louis Bourgeois, I will be making art well into my 90s.