Distinctly Montana Magazine

98 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 6 i i W HEN SCULPTOR REBECCA HUTCHINSON FIRST EN- COUNTERED THE GALLERY where she had been invited by the Yellowstone Art Museum (YAM) to create a show based on the history, culture, and environment of Billings, she knew she would have to go big. A 100-feet long room with soar- ing 30-feet ceilings, the space asserts itself in all directions. "I had to build big, which is indicative of what I do, I build large, but I had to build really large in this space," Hutchinson says, and remembers thinking, "'I can't just build a lot of something, I also have to move up in space.'" Embedded in the Overlap, on view at YAM through January 9, 2027, is Hutchinson's response to this challenge. Vernacular materials abound. Twenty-two towering sculptures of beetroot paper and clay, ranging from seven to 15 feet in height, run like a multi-colored forest down the length of the gallery. A mam- moth tumbleweed woven of creek willow anchors one end of the room. The installation sprawls out into the hallway, where more tumbleweeds and 45 prints featuring wind evoke the region's intense weather. "A tumbleweed goes until it hits something, a fence, a tree," Hutchinson says. "It's loaded with metaphor and meaning to me, it's a plant that detaches and it moves from place to place and regenerates seed as it moves." Formally trained as a ceramicist, Hutchinson's practice has evolved to encompass both clay and paper sculpture. The latter was always a personal passion, and she remembers when the two mediums came together for her while in residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena. Accompanied by her husband and 11 month-old daughter, Hutchinson moved to Hel- ena in 1993, and over the next two years fell in love with Montana while honing her craft. Thirty years later, Hutchinson is a profes- sor of ceramics at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, but she and her husband still spend every summer in Helena. She has a barn studio outside Clancy, which affords her the room to devel- op the large-scale, site-responsive installations that museums the world over invite her to build in their spaces. Hutchinson commit- by LINDSAY TRAN • photographs by NICKOLAS OLSON Embedded in the Overlap by Rebecca Hutchinson, 2026. On view at the Yellowstone Art Museum.

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