Sculpture season returns to Lincoln as Artists-in-Residence set to work on year five of BPSW installations

Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild entered its busiest time of the year last week as this year's two artist-in-residence went to work on the newest installations for the park.

Unlike some past artists, neither Cornelia Konrads nor Kate Hunt have released conceptual renditions of the work, which may make this year's launch Sept. 29 feel a bit more revelatory.

Konrads in particular prefers to keep her concept, a span incorporating lodgepole logs and barn wood, close to the vest.

She admits that as an artist, she has a hard time describing her work, which while similar in theme are quite varied in both form and material.

"A lot of my work are, in fact, different," she said. "Sometimes it's like a work which is coming out of the earth or sinking, or going up or going down. I like the middle point. It's like between breathing in and breathing out, a turning point."

Some of Konrad's most well-known work depicts structures that are coming apart, or are they coming together? That ambivalence is one of hallmarks of her work and it lets viewers make their own decision. She said she's found that people often fall into two different group, those who see elements of the structure going up, and those who see them coming down.

"I like this. Like a frozen moment. If you see a movie and it stops suddenly," she said. "In the imagination, the story goes on. Everybody thinks there's a different story."

She said a visitor to one of her sculptures in Japan said something she thought was very nice. "He said 'in your work is a lot of beauty, but is always also a moment of catastrophe.'"

Konrads said she has been doing site specific work for quite a few years, and likes the challenge of adapting the work to the site, once even taking on the challenge of creating a piece on a beach in four days using the driftwood she found on site.

The program this month marks only the second time Konrads, who hails from Wuppertal Germany, has visited Montana. The first time came in July, when she was here for a site visit.

"I love this landscape. The air, the water, the water's delicious; it's like champagne. I love it," she said. "You have to take care of this treasure, I think.

For Kate Hunt, the experience here is something of a flip side of that coin.

Raised in Helena, she's familiar with Montana and Lincoln, having driven through often and even attended rodeos here. But, she said the experience here has given both a new dimension.

"To get to know the locals; it's become a town, versus just a place where you slow down," she said, "That's been one of the biggest thrills of this whole thing, just to re-experience Montana. I had friends on the Dearborn in high school. It's very cool to be here."

For Hunt, outdoor installations aren't a foreign concept. She did a lot of them based on fences and boundaries when she was in graduate school in the Midwest, but she found it didn't translate when she returned home to Montana.

"It didn't have quite the punch. Then I just started cutting newspaper and one thing led to another. I've been with it for 40 years now," she said. "I got here, and it's funny how working with newspaper has made a living for me."

Hunt said newspaper, as a construction material is like wood in that you can do anything with it."

"Its a material that just gives itself to me," she said.

For her stock of working material, Hunt sometimes uses overruns from newspapers but said she also has newspapers send her their archives, presumably after they've been digitized.

"They can't bring themselves to take it to the dump, so they give them to me," she said.

Last week, after running out of Independent Record overruns, they turned to bound copies of the Jackson Hole News from the 90s, using the hard covers as a work surface.

Although she's worked with newspaper as a construction material for years, Hunt admitted she wasn't familiar with Steven Siegel's monolithic newspaper sculptures, like BPSW's "Hill and Valley."

"I was absolutely blown away by it," she said, and added that, while a bit intimidating, she didn't let it steer her away from her vison for a newspaper-based piece.

"I thought 'a lot of people paint with oils. It doesn't stop them'" she said

Hunt, who said she's done more indoor installations and gallery-type work in recent years, has created a series of three separate pieces installed along the path between "Gateway of Change" and "Tree Circus" for BPSW. Last week she was working to also create a bench, made of stacked newspaper, that visitors can rest on as they contemplate the artwork around them.