Kirsten Hassenfeld's elaborate paper sculptures draw on the artist's love of ornamentation and find power through her painstaking craftsmanship. The product of hundreds of hours of cutting, folding, rolling and coiling, her works have taken the form of jewels and luxury goods, ornaments and vases, and most recently trees and flowers.

The Bell Gallery exhibition includes two bodies of work. In her new series, Blueware, Hassenfeld turns to nature. Musing on the differences between hybridized and natural flower forms, which she relates to the hierarchy between the decorative and fine arts, the artist has created a series of sculpture that reference nature (trees, clouds, flowers) and the decorative arts (vases). Hundreds of rolled, painted, and lacquered paper beads ably mimic the appearance of ceramic as the artist bends Chinese export ware, English Willow Ware and Delft to the excesses of the Rococo. The centerpiece of the new work is a 6 x 8 foot tree.

Dans la Lune — a fanciful installation of ornate hanging sculpture that was commissioned in 2007 by the Rice Art Gallery, Houston, TX— completes the exhibition. The seven gigantic droplets in Dans la Lune resemble cameos, the onion domes of Russian architecture, and elaborate Christmas ornaments. The shift in scale is confounding; have we shrunk to a fraction of the size of an ornament, or grown to dwarf architecture? Each piece is frosted with dripping swags, chains, honeycomb beads, and gem-like crystal. Closer inspection reveals pictorial vignettes: a branch holding a tiny swing, a girl with curly hair twirling in her antebellum gown, a woman and a lacey pony in a miniature gazebo, and a pendant featuring Bacchus raising his cup of wine. Lit from within, the installation glows with an ethereal light, creating an otherworldly environment in keeping with the installation title: a French idiom referring to daydreaming that can be translated as "head in the clouds."

Kirsten Hassenfeld's work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the Northeast, including Material Pursuits at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont (2007); Crafty at the Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art (2006); Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project at the Jewish Museum (2006); Greater New York, PS1 Contemporary Art Center (2005); and Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum (2004). She has held residencies in NY a Dieu Donné Papermill (2005); the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation (2004); and the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program (2003); and at the Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, NE (2001). Hassenfeld was awarded a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2006 and was recently commissioned to create a percent-for-art project for the Department of Cultural Affairs, NY.

Kirsten Hassenfeld was born in Albany, New York, and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and an MFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson in 1998.

*Additional works by Kirsten Hassenfeld are on view from September 25 through November 14 in New Works: Sculpture and Drawings at Cade Tompkins Editions/Projects, 189 Hope St.