Christopher Burns

For The Maine Campus

Christie Edwards

Attracting artists from around the world, the Maine coast and hinterland is a region that is geologically quiet today, yet once was witness to a violent past. Clues to this past live in the ragged coast and exposed rock faces along the interstate, each clue written in a secret language known and deciphered by a privileged few.

Dudley Zopp, an artist educated at the University of Louisville, fell in love with the Maine coast for this reason. As part of the Intermedia MFA Visiting Artist series, Zopp spoke to UMaine faculty and students about the intersection of painting, sculpture and installation, and art’s role in decoding the natural world.

The lecture was held in the Innovative Media Research and Commercialization Center, Tuesday Oct. 29 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Her visit was sponsored by the Intermedia MFA Program, the Department of New Media, the University of Maine Cultural Affairs and Distinguished Lecture Series, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Correll Professorship in New Media.

Educated in painting and influenced by master painters like Picasso and Velazquez, Zopp approaches the media of painting from a sculptural perspective, allowing the canvas to become a new medium for engaging critically with sculptures.

For instance, the installation series “Sediments,” which engages with geologic phenomenon like slumps, used painted canvases as the base for her sculptures. Painted different colors, canvases were stacked on top of each other and allowed to shift and slump by natural inclination. A slump occurs when a sedimented, or consolidated, mass of earth shifts and slides down a slope.

Other sculptures, such as “Sediments 1” and “Biochemical Composition,” use stacked or arranged canvases to explore the nature of sedimentation and composition of the natural world. In these compositions, Zopp explores the “hidden landscapes and unseen tectonic forces that affect our lives.”

In her “Erratics” series, Zopp translates the coastal landscape. The Maine landscape has profoundly influenced her approach to shape-making. The coast, which at different times was subjected to continental rifts, earthquakes and volcanos, and the active, crafting hand of the ocean, contains a secret language, according to Zopp.

This has been essential to her sculptural explorations. Through epiphanic moments and the physical logic of sculpture, she uses art to decode the hidden language, and by decoding it, come to understand her experience of nature, the earth and the human relationship to the earth.

“Erratics,” which was featured at the Portland Museum of Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the University of Southern Maine, invites viewers into another world and reality.

“People move through an installation as a landscape,” Zopp said.

For her, the installation generates questions and forces the viewer to engage on a different level with the hope they will depart with a new way of deciphering their experience of nature.

The installation is crafted from builder’s paper with paint and incorporated text. Over a period of days, she folds, bends, twists and molds the paper to fit her vision. The product is a large, free-flowing mass, resembling an abstraction of the coastline.

Underlying her large-scale installations is an Eastern perspective and philosophy. Zopp is an avid reader of not only geologic texts, but also texts on Eastern spirituality from Buddhism to the Hindu “Rig Veda.” Central to this thought is the illusion of permanence; that all things are subject to change. In focusing on natural landscapes, Zopp contemplates the forces at work molding and shaping the earth. Many of these forces, like sedimentation, operate on a larger time scale to our own and remains unseen; while others, like slumps, occur quickly and violently, removing the very ground beneath our feet.

At the end of the lecture, Zopp proposed that students consider, and explore in their art, the place of humans in the natural world and what it may resemble in 25, 50 or 100 years.

In the end, we do not know what the earth and the human presence on it will look like in 100 years. When asked about her vision of the future, Zopp steered the conversation away from politics and quoted a line from Roman poet Ovid: “Everything changes, nothing perishes.”

Next fall, Zopp will be featured in a solo show at the Lord Hall Gallery.