There’s something enchanting about autumn in New England. Envision a stroll on a sprawling university campus where trees flank walkways that meander past ivy-covered brick buildings. Add the crackle of fallen leaves underfoot and the experience is complete.

Left: Wendy Klemperer, ‘Alert Wolf’ (2005-7), salvaged steel, 56 x 76 x 26″ Collection: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Booth Bay, ME.

Typically this time of year, Mills Courtyard, a U-shaped area the Paul Creative Arts Center encompasses on three sides, is rife with trees shedding their autumn attire, leaf-strewn sidewalks, and students hustling toward classes. But today and for the next couple of years this area of the University of New Hampshire campus also presents a touch of the unexpected. artes fine arts magazine

From the brick façade of the building three menacing wolf-dogs lunge toward you, teeth bared, lips curled. Part of the exhibition, Wendy Klemperer: Restraint and Release, the animals were created by Brooklyn (NY)-based artist Wendy Klemperer who fashions arresting, realistic looking wildlife from salvaged rebar and scraps of metal—materials that naturally convey the raw, untamed quality of the animals she depicts.

Chain Hounds

The sculpture, called Chain Hounds, exudes ruggedness, power, savagery.

That was my reaction to Wendy Klemperer’s work when I first came across it a couple of years ago. Enjoying a summer vacation in Boothbay, Maine, my husband and I zipped over to the nearby Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. I caught my breath as we drove through the main entrance. Ahead of us perched on a boulder was a wolf—the hair on its back standing on end exuding an aggressive body posture. And nearby was another wolf. Close by another was snarling and baring its teeth. They weren’t flesh and blood wolves, but convincing metal sculptures of the animals.

Farther inside the gardens, a caribou stands in silhouette. Off to the right, two deer graze on a distant knoll. A whimsical porcupine lumbers along the ground, convincingly real. All are created from salvaged metal and rebar from demolished construction sites and then reclaimed by Klemperer (for this installation, the artist is grateful to exhibit organizer, June LaCombe, Klemperer’s dealer in Maine).

Growing up in Watertown, MA, Klemperer has always been interested in painting and drawing as well as animals and nature. Both of her parents were practicing chemists and she was encouraged to study science; in college she was fascinated by DNA research and concepts of molecular evolution; she earned a degree in biochemistry at Harvard. While there she took art classes as well each semester. Her love of art won out and she eventually studied sculpture at Pratt Institute in New York.

Klemperer’s studio, in Brooklyn, NY, has a parking lot adjacent to it where she warehouses her salvaged rebar, spent metal, and reconstituted steel. Her studio inhabits an industrial area. A mixed, artsy neighborhood, her studio adjoins a sanitation truck repair company on one side. How do neighbors react to scrap metal strewn about the grounds? It works, she says because she has a chain link fence around the property covered with ivy, so it’s not an eye sore. She’s also created a green area with colorful gardens and a profusion of flowers. My vision of a stark parking lot strewn with broken bottles, overgrown with weeds and dry, barren ground was not accurate.

The Artistic Vision

“The pieces of steel that I choose are bent and twisted,” Klemperer says. “Such pieces contain energy and potential new life.” She says her welding process is a kind of three-dimensional gesture drawing, building skeletal form in space with a network of steel lines. “The sculptures use the body language of animals to express a feeling or state of being,” she says. “Industrial refuse is transformed to make motion convey emotion.”

The imagery that pervades her work captures a lifelong fascination with animals. “To focus on the animal realm seems no less important than on that of humans,” she says, “and only underscores the continuity and relationship between all forms of life on earth.”

Underscoring her love of animals is Klemperer’s activities at her family’s summer house in Nelson, NH. Tucked in the scenic Monadnock region of New Hampshire, the Nelson property was purchased in 1938 by her grandparents. Both doctors, the grandparent’s 40-acre property became the touch point for Klemperer to connect with nature. She spent many summers there as a child and it seeped into her soul.

It still feeds her soul today.

Going Home

She was at her family homestead when I spoke with her recently. Working on art projects for upcoming shows while there, she also finds time to ride a neighbor’s horse that need exercising. She does this seven days a week. Despite her busy work schedule, riding is a priority.

Currently Klemperer is working on a sculpture for a park in Portland, OR inspired by a recent residency in Alaska’s Denali National Park.

The experience at Denali was the Klemperer’s first adventure into the wilderness by herself. “Denali is an intact eco-system,” she says. “The public has to stay in the bus, but I was allowed to roam about in the car. I saw lots of wildlife—bear, moose, coyote—bursting forth from undercover brush. Taking it out of the studio into the wild,” she says, “was a great way to experience new things.”

Klemperer’s work has been commissioned by cities, botanical gardens, sculpture parks, and universities from New York to China. Because her work tends to be larger-than-life scale, her work is best experienced in a spacious outdoor setting. Exhibiting her work on a university campus is especially gratifying for Klemperer. College campuses are great places for viewing sculpture: spacious grounds, in an environment that emphasizes questioning and  intellectual growth: the sculptures are food for thought .

Which is why she was pleased to have a show at the University of New Hampshire. Fond of capturing the “extreme moment”—an animal lunging or lying in wait—the pieces in her current show do just that. In addition to the Chain Hounds an oversized caribou graces the grounds near the Johnson Theater on UNH’s campus. Caribou (Ihumataq) is imposing, impressive, and incredible. Larger than life, the caribou’s ponderous mass with preposterous, branchy antlers elicits a jolt of excitement when first encountered– exactly the reaction Klemperer is aiming for.

“The size seems prehistoric, recalling an era when elk and other giants may have wandered across North America,” she says. “The expansion of scale reflects the place a wild beast holds in our imagination: not the actual animal but the huge space it takes up in the mind’s eye.”

What’s unique about her wildlife work is that it is largely transparent. “The surrounding environment fills the negative spaces between the lines of sculpture,” she says. “Emptiness is imbedded in the pieces and echoes the absence of that animal from the land. Naturalism is an underpinning of the work, but just the starting point for the imaginative, expressive development of form as motion.”

No matter the time of year, this outdoor exhibition is a delight to take in.

By Linda Chestney, Contributing Writer

Visit the new Museum of Art in the Paul Creative Arts Center at the University of New Hampshire: http://cola.unh.edu/moa