Bellevue Arts Museum is proud to announce the exhibition Barbara Cooper, re:Growth a gathering of wood sculptures and drawings by the Chicago-based conceptual artist. Using salvaged wood scraps discarded by the milling industry, Cooper creates imposing organic shapes which populate the gallery space with a mysterious sculptural forest. Cooper writes, “I want to mirror the efficiency I find in nature by recycling waste product into a new generation of form.” Cooper's marred and twisted trunk-like forms are iconic and powerful; for their very existence addresses both the resilience of nature and the regenerative power of art.
 
Crafted through the repetitive process of amassing by slowly layering materials, Barbara Cooper's works are imbued with the very time the artist invested in their creation: as in nature, time is the literal and metaphorical measure for growth and re-growth in new directions. "My focus is on how a form records its growth process of evolving from one condition to another as it responds to its environment. This process of transformation is an essential aspect of life."

With titles such as Surge, Span and Mast, Barbara Cooper's works convey the sense of a constant state of change and out-reaching growth.
 
Cooper holds a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and has been represented in numerous gallery and museum shows, both group and individual exhibitions, across the country as well as in Iceland.

This exhibition has been organized to complement the exhibition Turning Wood into Art: The Jane and Arthur Mason Collection, an exhibition of 126 turned wood sculptures.