By Jenny Zeller
The beginning of August brought cooler temperatures and a cool new Artist in Residence to Bernheim.
For the last twenty years of her practice, photographer Sharon Harper has regularly attended artist residencies and traveled to unfamiliar places to make experimental photographs that show her things she “cannot see without the camera.” Most recently she has been working in protected lands, “emphasizing ideas related to land formation and the actions that took place in geologic deep time”. Each time Sharon starts a new project, she uses a different camera or approach.
With 15,625 acres of land and a residency encouraging artists to further investigate, experiment and explore new avenues in their practice, Bernheim is the perfect location for Sharon to be inspired and create new work.
Spending the first two weeks in August at Bernheim, Sharon moved from the unknown to the known with extensive exploration of Bernheim’s grounds. During this initial time of total immersion, she observed her surroundings and documented the natural forces at work in the forest. She even impressed us all by hiking the Millennium Trail!
The raw material she gathered has planted the seeds for fulling her residency and will take shape in her studio before returning again in January. Sharon has shared some of her initial ideas, all of which are very exciting and we are looking forward to seeing her again this winter!
Sharon Harper received an MFA in photography and related media from the School of Visual Art in New York. Her work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Fine Art in Houston among others. She has attended numerous artist residency fellowships including Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.
Sharon is a 2013 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in Photography and currently a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.