DANCE AND STEEL are an unlikely pairing. But in the hands of American artist Maren Hassinger, it makes perfect sense. Over the past fifty years, Hassinger has developed an expansive practice that explores movement and our relationship to nature through the various media of sculpture, installation, performance, video, and public art.
Hassinger frequently works with industrial materials in ways that relate to traditional craft techniques, like the weaving of steel rope, to create sculptures and installations that are evocative of the natural world. As one of her primary concerns, nature is a leitmotif that appears throughout Hassinger’s work, from her earliest sculptures and performances, dating to the 1970s, to her most recent creations. Steel rope, as in the current Oklahoma Contemporary piece, offers the artist an analogue to the natural world. Hassinger says, “It looks natural to me, even though it’s wire and even though it’s rope—all of which is manufactured.” Likewise, her choice of material lends a sense of movement to her sculptures, at once simple and insightful. As one ArtForum reviewer marveled, her “elegant and unassuming productions…left me wanting more.”
Motion has always been evident in Hassinger’s work, and the artist’s longstanding interest in dance manifests in sculptures that appear to be enacting a natural choreography. Her recent outdoor sculpture Paradise Regained (2020) is a primary example of the artist masterfully transforming the heavy and inert materials of steel and concrete into a leaning field of wire, with the frayed ends of rope seemingly swaying in the wind. From a distance, the sculpture appears delicate, light, with a kind of energy bound up in the twisted cable.
Paradise Regained characterizes a body of work Hassinger has been actively making throughout her career that comprises steel rope anchored to a grid of concrete pavers. The artist first discovered the industrial material in a salvage yard nearly five decades ago. In it, she saw flowing rivers, branches blowing in the wind, leaves, twigs, and other organic matter, and with it, Hassinger continues to create sculptures and installations that remind us of our connection to the natural world.
Nature, Sweet Nature will be on view in the Sculpture Garden at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center through summer 2022. Garden and Paradise Regained will be on view at Oklahoma Contemporary through summer 2022.