Helena Artist Rebecca Hutchinson’s exhibit “Embedded in the Overlap” is currently at Yellowstone Art Museum.
An award-winning sculptor, Rebecca Hutchinson was one of 12 recipients of the 2015 “Women to Watch” award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. An educator for over 20 years, she currently serves as full professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth teaching undergraduate and graduate ceramics.
The YAM exhibit “Embedded in the Overlap” is inspired by aspects of Billing’s distinctive character: the history of settlement along the geographically prominent Rimrocks, the industries that sustain its communities, and the dramatic, and often unpredictable, weather of the plains.
For the exhibit, diverse materials from the Billings region such as beet pulp, blue jeans, creek willow, and regional clay are carefully collected and transformed by Hutchinson. Much of the organic and fibrous content is boiled, pulped, and poured into large sheets of paper; the paper sheets are further cut, coated in clay, and coiled to build up the vessel forms. In addition to sculpture, printmaking serves as a medium through which Hutchinson expresses her concept of place.
In her work, the research is very important to the inspiration and the making process.
Connecting to people and place is important to Hutchinson, and she found her voice through art organically.
“I think it was a combination of recognizing that materials had meaning and that objects had a role in connecting with people, and I loved that! I grew into that as an undergrad student and then deciding that I wanted to go to graduate school, deciding that I wanted to be a maker, and have always been a maker since that time, that was my form of connecting to people, right?”
Helena artist Rebecca Hutchinson is at YAM Thursday evening, August 6 at 5 PM for a talk in the Murdock Gallery, with reception to follow in the Montana Gallery. The exhibit, “Embedded in the Overlap” opened April 6th and runs through January 9, 2027.
