Many of Pepper’s works in steel are highly polished to reflect the surrounding environment (whether indoor or landscape) as well as the viewer and lend an illusory sense of weightlessness to the structures. As the artist has stated, “In a certain light the sculpture appears to absorb the landscape or the landscape absorbs the sculpture. The essential attempt was to have a continuity between the work and the environment, the environment and the work.” Because these forms are often streamlined, often modeled on geometric solids, critics sometimes associated Pepper’s early work with Minimalism, but such a link mistook her intentions. In contrast to that movement’s agenda of providing unambiguous and impersonal visual information, Pepper’s sculptures are intended to carry deeper emotional or even spiritual connotations. This particular work, designed to be installed on the floor, was created during the same period that Carl André was transforming sculpture by placing geometrically-regular plates of unpolished steel in square or rectilinear combinations directly on the floor, removing sculpture from the pedestal and creating “cuts” in space as well as engaging viewers as they walked on them. Pepper, in contrast, irregularized highly-polished stainless steel plates, conjoining them with welds (as here), forming them into lyrical or even playful structures.
