Laura Cooper’s exhibition at RDFA consists of large transparent sculptures, wall pieces in the form of shallow paper mache bowls, and ceramic bowls.  Since the 1990’s her work has been acutely interested in and inspired by forms that occur in the natural world. The fragility and precariousness of the environment, becoming more acute each year, is present in much of the work.

In this current exhibition at RDFA, Cooper’s sculptural works were developed as an extended conversation with a plant that grows in her garden (a magnificent Aloe marlotthii) and a two-volume compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The resulting sculptures are essentially three-dimensional drawings formed by the push and pull of tendril like growth and the gravity of glue-soaked paper. The work itself is slow and painstaking as well as meditative. No interior support is used, only plant and paper and glue make up the structure, so the work is a constant process of making, and letting dry, and then making some more. Each bloom stalk, which is the partial core of the pieces, occurs once per year for this single plant. The largest sculptures can take almost that long to make.  In the process, mutable growth patterns emerge; neural pathways; trees branching, mycelium webs and cosmic webs grow as associations with words always consumed by image and structure.

Also included in this exhibition are some of the functional stoneware ceramics that Cooper has been making obsessively throughout the pandemic to now. Inspired by both the process of “throwing” the bowls on the wheel, and the glazing process, Cooper has been influenced by this craft process to integrate the form into paper-mache wall pieces, which become an intersection of the processes in all of her current work.