SPcooper was born in Nebraska and was raised in multiple states

including a Naval Base in Rhode Island. She attended a community

college in Bridgeport Ct., Kansas City Art Institute, Suny, and NYU.

These were peripatetic educational experiences interspersed and

interrupted by various necessary employment. Initial art process/

training was both traditional and experimental abstract painting and

printmaking.

Following a near death experience (that was not accidental) in the

early eighties in NYC, she began to create paintings (The River

Series) and drawings that reflected a personal story fused with more

universal themes of loss, violence, and the transformation of these

through archetypal and symbolic imagery. Many of the images contain

scenes of the natural world with human and other animal forms

disconnected from their bodies but intact energetically. Animals in

various forms frequently act as guides or psychopomps which are

benevolent helpers intrinsically linked to human existence.

This particular series morphed into later work which became less

concerned with specific imagery (although many of the previously

mentioned elements became enmeshed in the patterns and surface) and my

practice became about having a more direct experience and not

delineating a specific story. Painting started to incorporate ideas of

sedimentary layers and how parts are often forgotten or hidden by the

next cycle of events. The painting, "The History of Russia", for

example, is about the layers of history, known and unknown, the

terrain transformed, and how all merges together over the span of time

into a landscape and horizon line.

At this point in my practice, I try to find the place where the

painting occurs without too much of my own specific intention or

interference. This attempt is to let go of prior expectation which can

feel something like freedom in the moment. Gesture becomes far less of

a visual expectation and more of a feeling, somatic experience when

marks are "just happening" without my psyche being the dominant force.

In terms of recent sculpture, I continue to collect and use disparate

objects and parts of things in order to create a series of assemblages (Noli Timere) 

that overlay literary, historical, and elegiac themes. 

These more recent pieces have also undergone a shift in that the individual parts and sections become more unified through a single color of black paint.

Edwina Time Traveler is a collaborative photography and video project.

 Edwina is the protagonist who appears in found settings and tableaus along with other eccentric characters.