The kernel of the thought that leads to a piece of installation art can be very abstract indeed. For Luzene Hill, a Cherokee artist who was recently asked to create a work representing violence against women, the process takes weeks and can begin like this: Which object would best represent a rape—corn husks or communion wafers, rose petals or dried leaves? Hill says she can get stopped for hours at such artistic forks in the road, contemplating the shapes and meanings associated with the various items as she walks through the woods around her home in Whittier, North Carolina.

In this case, she chose rose petals—some 24,480 of them, which will be added to her piece, Human Rites...the body and blood, 720 petals at a time. Hill chose the numbers after doing a bit of homework: according to a Washington, D.C.-based rape awareness group, an American woman is sexually assaulted every two minutes—720 women each day, though many rapes are unreported. Hill’s work will be on display at UNC-Asheville’s Highsmith Union Gallery from October 12 to November 14, exactly 34 days, meaning the piece will represent 24,480 rapes, the total theoretical number that will occur while the show is up. Her display is something of a prelude to UNC-Asheville’s "anti-conference," Visualizing Human Rights, a collaboration between the community and several university departments. During the day and evening on November 14, there will be dance, theater and musical performances around campus.

Among artists, installation artists are a particularly high-concept crew. Think of Marcel Duchamp’s upside-down urinal, Fountain, often pegged as an early example of installation art. Or the German artist Joseph Beuys, who in 1974 spent three days trapped in a New York art gallery with a wild coyote as part of his installation and performance piece I Like America and America Likes Me. Hill, who grew up in Atlanta and didn’t start drawing and painting until later in life, says it was a traveling exhibit of the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning’s work that first inspired her to create art that people could experience in three dimensions. "I wanted to be part of the painting, experiencing it more fully," she says, explaining that de Kooning made her want to be completely surrounded by an artwork, rather than simply taking it in from a distance. "It was thrilling. It was a totally altered state."

Hill hasn’t yet wrangled any wild animals, but her installations are certainly heady. In one recent work, Transparent to Transcendence, based on a Kiowa Indian myth, she suspended seven beeswax figures from the ceiling of an Atlanta art gallery whose walls she had painted a deep black-blue. The figures represented seven young girls fleeing from their brother, who had turned into a bear and intended to kill them. The wax figures, fearful and frail-looking, were "freefalling up," she wrote in her description of the piece. Even in her drawings and paintings, she uses a good deal of negative space. "I always include it. It gives a vulnerable aspect to the figures," she says.

Hill’s father was Cherokee, her mother white, and her work frequently deals with Native American themes. She exhibited drawings and paintings for the first time in 1997 at the Santa Fe Indian Market, an annual August gathering in downtown Santa Fe that is one of the largest displays of Native American art in the country. Hill is the program outreach coordinator at Oconaluftee Institute for Cultural Arts in Cherokee, and she is interested in Native American language revitalization projects. In 2007, she illustrated three children’s books based on Cherokee legends. Occasionally, iconic Native American images crop up almost subconsciously in her work, she says.

But she is also well aware—and quite wary of—the cliches that surround Native American art. "When a lot of people hear ‘Native American artist,’ that phrase, they instantly think about either traditional work—pottery and baskets—or if they think of images, paintings, it’s of particular colors: aqua and sand, images of historical Indians, Indians on ponies in the sunset," she says, noting that there’s nothing wrong with those types of artwork. Still, "there are lots of contemporary artists who are Native Americans and not stereotypal, or even particularly traditional."

She believes people would be surprised at the abstractness—the modern, sophisticated feel of much pre-Colombian Native American art. Her 2005 installation piece, The Pilgrimage Ribbon, at Western Carolina University’s Fine and Performing Art Center Museum in Cullowhee, was based on an Aztec "codex," an early form of the book. This particular 22-panel codex, the Codex Boturini, tells the story of the Aztecs’ epic search for a sacred place to build a city. In the Cullowhee gallery, Hill created a sculpture from stacks of 484 hand-stained manuscripts, and during the course of the exhibition, she removed manuscripts at random. The stacks got gradually smaller, drawing attention, she wrote, to "the expanding empty space as Native American culture disappears."

Tearing and staining nearly 500 pieces of paper becomes something of a meditation, she says, as does hunting through buckets containing hundreds of roses, in search of petals that are just the right shape and color. Not all of her ideas for installation pieces come off successfully, for various reasons. (Her idea to represent rape using pieces of bread, for example, was both unappealing to her after a while and to UNCA’s gallery managers, who worried that the bread would draw bugs.)

In 1994, Hill was attacked and raped while jogging in an Atlanta park. Afterwards, she did some drawing but was less than pleased with the results. "It was more of a release of energy than creating art," she says. Over the years, she has addressed the event in various ways as her approach to drawing, painting and installation art has evolved. But she doesn’t feel that the rape has defined her—as an artist, or as an individual. The 15 years that have passed since the crime have given her a good deal of emotional distance from it. Still, she feels she can bring a particular sensibility and deep empathy to a work like the one she’s creating for UNCA this fall, addressing both violence and women. "I think this is exactly the right time to be doing this," she says. Referring to the statistics she chose as a starting point for the UNCA installation, she says: "This happens to a lot more women than people think."