ALEX TRIPPE
Alex Trippe’s artistic journey has taken her from an interest in film and photography to a deeper study of the stories of materials. She explores the interrelations between objects and humans— how objects contain the traces of their past as entities having their own life cycles. This exhibition, which places her crafted objects alongside assemblages of found shells, rocks, and ropes, allows the interplay between them to invoke the transformations each material has gone through, the life each has lived. The found shells and rocks bring out the organic, living qualities of her sculptures, invoking various material elements including calcium, silica, lead, and lime, which serve as building blocks for both the biological and manufactured worlds. Her sculptures in turn bring out the history of use, shaping, and impact the found objects have undergone as transformed under heat or pressure. The creative glass sculptures with their diverse surfaces and embedded materials inspire inquiry into the various processes Trippe used to cast, blow, and mold them. Trippe’s lost-wax casting process allows her to make intricate glass forms, such as a human ear, a leaf, or ropes variously knotted, whose delicacy belie the usual stiffness associated with glass, emphasizing its liquid nature as well as the lost wax and plaster mold that contributed to their formation. Her sculpted ears encourage us to listen to their material vibrations as we would auditory sound waves. The quasi-fossilized forms of ears and plants in the sculptures remind the viewer of geological processes. The sculptures’ emphasis on states of matter narrates the passage of time and its impact. Like a beach’s wrack line, whose detritus of seaweed and shells mark the highest point of a tide before it recedes, her objects mark the traces of moving and living forces that have sculpted their existences into being. The result evokes a reflective journey, as if transported to the beaches that inspired her, into the materials and forces that surround us and immerse us in their tide.
— Karin Flora, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Candidate
EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026