Aleksandra Scepanovic
Aleksandra Scepanovic is a sculptor based in Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York. Raised in socialist Yugoslavia, where expression often lived in whispers, she grew up in an environment that didn’t place art at the center of life. Her perspective shifted dramatically during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, when she worked as a war reporter. That experience didn’t turn her into an artist overnight, but it left a lasting imprint—one that later found shape through sculpture, when words were no longer enough.
Though she never pursued a formal degree in fine arts, Aleksandra studied in many places: the Art Students League, Florence Academy of Art, Lyme Academy, and Philippe Faraut’s studio, among others. Each offered fragments of technique and foundation, but the work itself—the act of shaping form and narrative—has been her greatest teacher.
Clay is her anchor. For Scepanovic, sculpting is as much therapy as creation, a grounding act that connects her to something ancient and primal. She often incorporates stone, wood, metal, and found objects into her pieces, weaving them into narratives that touch on fracture, transformation, and identity. Migration, trauma, and memory surface throughout her work, whether intended or not.
Her inspirations span disciplines and genres—Louise Bourgeois, Giacometti, Camille Claudel, and Ron Mueck, but also Kafka, Tarkovsky, and myth. She admires artists unafraid of discomfort, those who show how beauty and unease often exist side by side.
Her creative process relies more on rhythm than routine. Early mornings and late nights, when the world is quiet, are her most generative hours. She works on multiple pieces at once, collecting objects that eventually “start speaking to each other.” The Hudson Valley landscape—its fog, stone, stillness, and decay—shapes much of her work, as in The Vanishing, a piece that dissolved from a head into something less distinct, like a memory slipping away.
Themes of liminality, fracture, and becoming are central. “If there’s a message in my work,” she says, “it’s that we’re allowed to live in the in-between. To be unfinished, fractured, reshaped.”
The most fulfilling part of her journey has been moving from the solitude of the studio to sharing work publicly. Once fearful of showing her pieces, she has found connection in the conversations they spark. For her, success is measured not in accolades but in honesty—if her work makes someone pause and feel something unexpected, it has done its job.
Looking ahead, Scepanovic envisions larger-scale works that can live outdoors, curatorial projects that unite artists across mediums, and continued collaborations with creatives from disciplines as varied as dance, poetry, light, and sound. Her current series, The Supper Before Last, reimagines mythological female figures in a moment of rupture and reckoning, while The Inside Job presses heads into found vessels—awkward, absurd, and achingly human.
At its core, her practice remains close to its first impulse: to make something true.
