Zopp translates landscape layer by layer by layer

Continuing on our quest to track down and bag the new and old artists of Waldo County, your dedicated HiLo Art team, intrepid photo hound Peggy McKenna and I, the Elmer Fudd of the art hunters, poked our noses in on Dudley Zopp this past week to see what we could see.

The second floor studio feels extremely familiar, almost a déjà vu. This was also the second floor space of Gallery 68 where many shows have gone up and come down over the past ten years. Since two years ago when Zopp bought the building on Lower Main Street, she has worked and lived there fulltime, and the walls and floors have shifted their functions radically. From the almost antiseptic cleanliness and enforced quiet of exhibit space where art goes when it is ready to sell, the creative jumble and “noise” of huge piles of torn paper, tables strewn with paint, ink and brushes, a wall slathered with paint from a previous project, canvases and panels leaning against walls, prints stacked on the floor, the place has become an active art environment that has only a little to do with presentation but everything to do with process. It’s refreshing to feel the change. And it’s interesting and indicative of the current scene that in one of Belfast’s once most pristine showplaces, a very serious and committed artist is now at work.

Zopp is an impassioned newcomer. She loves downtown Belfast. It’s just urban enough, and there are no leaves to rake or yards to mow. She likes not having a house with all its rooms, likes the openness of her space, and the openness of Belfast, so close to the “edgy cliffs” and ocean, which she says she has come to need since she began coming to Maine in the late ‘80s.

Unlike her experiences in larger communities, here she goes out on the street and sees people she knows. She feels that Belfast is a fabulous artists’ community, a magnet of some kind, which she describes with a laugh as more cosmic than real estate driven. She likes both Belfast and Maine’s independent spirit, and she is hooked on its landscape and light.

Zopp grew up in Lexington, Ky., went to the University of Kentucky in Louisville [sic] where she earned degrees in Modern Foreign Languages and in French. She went on to postgraduate studies in visual art, but her experience with writing and language seems to run just as deep in her blood as the visual.

She works in several different media: ephemeral site specific installations in sculpturally built swirls and layers of paper, collages paper on wooden panels, oil paintings, and monoprints. Though abstract, all the work is about the layering of experience in the act of moving through the landscape and the ways in which the landscape itself is a written code for that experience. Specific combinations of rocks, land forms and tree branches that Zopp encounters on long, solitary hikes come together as the written expression of the place and open possibilities of transcription and interpretation.

“While walking,” Zopp says, “You think, ‘I know what that arrangement of branches, light, rocks means: I know what that code is saying.’ And so I bring it in and recreate it so you’d have the same feeling as you experienced outdoors.”

Much of her work is on paper and incorporates long and deep layers of nearly indecipherable pencil transcriptions from letters or books or, in some larger pieces, calligraphy made with an ink-loaded brush and the full sweep of her arm. These writings are woven into surfaces by interleaving layers of pigments, charcoal, shellac, collaged paper fragments, and always more writings. The paper at times takes on the tactile quality and age of skin.

The question of meaning and space, conceptual and physical, the near reading of the combination of obscured words, the brush marks on torn paper strips, dangling or glued together, bring to mind forests, the light filtering through branches, and the notion that, like the deep chanting of Tibetan monks, there is a profound and wordless voice, partly your own, penetrating and supporting the structure of the world.

Zopp’s work plays with the potential of this voice to become a creative companion as we make our journey. Caught between reading visual sensations vs. reading texts, the viewer ideally reaches through the frustration and opens an inner ear to silence, alertness, reflection and the possibility of meaning.

Alan Crichton, The Waldo Independent, Belfast, Maine, March 26, 1998.