Reviving the Rust Belt: Hannah Bates’s Aggregate, at The Sculpture Center

The post-industrial landscape of Cleveland is by now a familiar visual and conceptual trope in the city’s contemporary art scene. Even as Cleveland actively rebrands itself beyond its legacy of deindustrialization, the rust belt’s industrial past continues to shape both the physical environment and materials readily available to artists. In her exhibition Aggregate, on view at The Sculpture Center through April 26, Hannah Bates approaches this history with a sensitivity to how these landscapes are still alive—still changing. Her work casts light on the unnoticed moments where the industrial and organic meet, overlap, and regenerate.

The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on Cleveland’s post-industrial landscape—one shaped as much by rust and ruin as it is by resilience. Working with materials gathered from across Northeast Ohio, Bates assembles a world where nature and industry blur. The result is a tactile, intimate exhibition that doesn’t just describe the region’s ecology, but actually feels like it. As visitors move through the space, there’s a sensation of wandering through landscape at once familiar and uncanny, as if stumbling upon the remains of a place half-remembered, half-reimagined.

Curated with a sensitivity toward scale and spatial rhythm, the exhibition doesn’t impose a narrative so much as it invites slow accumulation, true to its title. There’s no central focal point, no heroic monument. Instead, Aggregate encourages close looking, calling for bodily engagement. Bates has deliberately chosen a size for each of the works that “you can hold in your hands,” and that’s exactly what these works evoke [1]. There’s a strange tenderness in their materiality; we want to reach out, cup them, understand their weight. The process of mold-making and casting is not simply a fabrication method here; it becomes a metaphor for care, for knowing something through touch.

This commitment to human scale is perhaps Aggregate’s quietest and most radical gesture. In an era of climate grief and ecological spectacle, Bates resists the impulse to monumentalize. Instead, she constructs a vocabulary of humility, informed by the hyperlocal. Each piece arises from a practice of wandering and wondering while walking through Cleveland’s Wendy Park, combing the edges of Whiskey Island, and observing the thaw and refreeze of snow and lake ice. As Bates explained, this slow gathering process became a way of locating herself in Cleveland, of finding “wildness and awe” in an urban environment still bearing the marks of heavy industry.

The sculptures themselves oscillate between objecthood and relic. Thaw (2022 – 2025), for instance, is a standout work that draws on both material poetry and environmental metaphor. Composed of slumped glass over bricks scavenged from Lake Erie’s shoreline, the work captures a moment of flux—glass held mid-collapse, as if melting in slow motion. Bates describes the material of glass as a “supercooled liquid”—always in movement—and here, it acts as both shield and shroud. There is a protective quality to the way the glass folds, like a gesture of sheltering. Yet at the same time, the fragility of the medium suggests vulnerability: climate change, yes, but also personal and seasonal shifts. In the early spring light that shines through the large front windows of the Sculpture Center, the surface of Thaw gleams like ice, but up close, fractures, bubbles, and the warp of time remain visible.

If Thaw holds poetic stillness, Deciduous (2025) is more declarative. Pairing invasive plant forms cast in bronze with industrial cement, this body of work addresses the tension between preservation and loss. The title suggests seasonal shedding, but there’s also a sense of accretion: of plant matter overtaking abandoned lots, of nature adapting despite human intervention. The casting process freezes these fleeting organisms in time, offering a paradox—ephemeral plants immortalized in unforgiving material. Bates isn’t romanticizing resilience here; rather, she underscores how environmental adaptation often emerges from necessity, not beauty.

While Aggregate might draw from traditions of land art and ecological sculpture, its intimacy resists the grand gestures of 1970s earthworks. Bates doesn’t seek to alter the landscape; she listens to it. Her attention to rust belt infrastructure—the inclusion of cast steel, the echo of factory debris—roots the work in a distinctly regional history. These are not generic natural forms; they are Cleveland forms.

The installation itself is quietly brilliant. Bates noted that the space “was perfect for the work,” and it’s easy to see why. The Sculpture Center’s raw brick walls and hardwood floors amplify the sense of encounter. Works are installed on low to mid height and unframed, which reinforces their earthbound quality. During the daytime, the natural light from the front windows cast gentle shadows that echo the show’s attention to cycles of light, temperature, and season. The effect is cumulative: these are not standalone objects, but parts of a system. As Bates put it, “each works has to be in conversation with each other.”

That sense of dialogue is perhaps Aggregate’s greatest strength. It models an ecological way of thinking—not through spectacle or moralizing, but through adjacency, resonance, and responsiveness. Viewers are invited to read connections between glass and bronze, between cement and forest floor. Aggregate is an exhibition that doesn’t shout, but it leaves you with something to carry. It’s a tactile, clever show—one that lingers not because of what it tells you, but because of what it makes you notice: the texture of brick shaped by waves, the sheen of glass in natural light, the persistence of plant life. Aggregate invites viewers to see Cleveland not as a landscape of ruin, but as one of ongoing transformation. Rather than abstracting nature into metaphor, Bates makes it literal, castable, touchable. In doing so, she offers not just critique but connection—a way of placing ourselves, however tentatively, back into the ecosystems we’ve fractured.
To see the show on view till April 26th, visit the Sculpture Center at 12210 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106 from 12pm-5pm Wednesdays through Saturdays.

[1] Quotes from the artist, Hannah Bates, are from a conversation with the author on 03/21/2025.