Artist Statement
Hopi Breton’s work celebrates the natural world and the human connection within it. She creates sculptures that are hybrids of figurative elements, inanimate objects, animals, and combinations of mixed media. Her work leans on ecology and language/literature as guides, and she finds poetic connections in the combination of materials and forms to spark new meanings and metaphors. In her most current solo exhibition, Salt and Stone, Hopi considers themes of place, displacement, and spiritual well-bring connected to land and home, amid heightened emotions of collective anxiety, loss, and climate crisis. A tortoise signifies endurance; candles evoke memory, reverence, and prayer. A blanket made from rock suggests security and rootedness, while a boulder balancing on a ladder symbolizes precariousness and unease. Chains made soft and floral symbolize the tension between comfort and constraint. In Adrift and Unmoored, a raft and a nest evoke safety and calm amid the uncertainty suggested by the open ocean. Through unexpected combinations, Hopi explores tensions of our collective stresses and unearths poetic connections toward well-being and rootedness.
Bio
Hopi Breton is a Bay Area/Mendocino artist, and a faculty member in the Art Department at Diablo Valley College where she heads the sculpture program and manages the Jewelry program. She holds a BA from Loyola University in New Orleans, and an MFA from Montana State University. She also comes from a family filled with musicians and visual artists. Hopi has a strong technical background in metal fabrication, metal casting, and moldmaking, and works in a variety of media. In addition, Hopi spent a decade teaching and creating in New Orleans which still inspires her to create large scale backpack puppets and to organize and participate in public parades. Hopi has organized and worked with students and peers to create cast iron art performances nationally, including the International Cast Iron Art Conference at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, AL, The Western Cast Iron Art Conference, in Denver, CO, and the Fire Arts Festival at the Crucible in Oakland, CA. Her work has been shown nationally, and throughout the Bay Area and Mendocino County.