Natural Inclinations:
Works by Margaret Boozer, Elizabeth Burger,
Marc Robarge and Laura Thorne
CURATOR'S STATEMENT

The four artists featured in this exhibition, Margaret Boozer, Elizabeth Burger, Marc Robarge and Laura Thorne, all create works that spring from the natural world in ways material, conceptual or formal. Both the grandeur of nature and its’ delightful specificity are explored with a combination of creative curiosity and scientific inquisitiveness. Embracing some of natures’ most dominant characteristics, including the element of chance, the transformation and evolution of matter and materials, and the cell by cell cumulative process by which growth occurs, the sculpture in this exhibition elegantly echoes the busy and complex world outside and begins a dialogue that is both highly personal and broadly universal.

In semi-minimalist fashion, created by lining up circular ceramic discs in a loosely geometric structure, Margaret Boozer’s Accumulation forms a quilt-like honeycomb pattern on the wall. Yet Boozer, ever the alchemist, has also given her fascination with the earth’s myriad colors and textures free reign. In each individual disc she has created a small cell-like composition based on a free-wheeling experimentation with different clays and minerals applied and fired in varying combinations and permutations. While the entire composition works in gestalt-like unity, each component also invites both scrutiny and wonder at the endless variety and possibilities she has created in partnership with the earth. Angle of Incidence is a “dirt drawing” made by sifting and arranging several colors of clay in different degrees of coarseness in an elongated geometric pattern directly on the gallery floor. Flawlessly executed and elegant in its simplicity, this piece celebrates the materials from which it is made while it points to the passage of time and the transformational power of the forces of nature. Boozer’s creations work first through their powerful holistic presence and next as slowly revealed testaments to the endless variety of nature and human invention.

Elizabeth Burger’s work is directly informed and profoundly influenced by the environment surrounding her home amid the hills and valleys of Western Maryland. Scavenging her materials from the land, she makes use of seedpods, roots, algae, reeds, flax and palm fibers. Combined and recombined, these and other materials are culled into handmade paper which she wraps, skin-like, around an inner structure or armature. What Burger builds are powerful totemic forms, which mirror those found in nature. The three part piece, Apart, for instance, refers to the human shape, while also bringing to mind a stand of aged and dignified trees or magnified and outsized seedpods. With their gentle textures, poetic color variations and subtle and brittle beauty, these works point to what is left behind at the season’s end, traces of the cycle of living and dying. In this way, Burger’s work poignantly highlights nature’s markers of both growth and transformation.

Laura Thorne is also interested in both the concept and the reality of the transformation process. In making sculpture, she participates literally in a transformative activity by taking forms directly from nature and changing both their scale and material. The tall forms echoed four times in ”Ritual”, for instance, are shaped and colored like sinuous and worn driftwood, yet they have each been cast in bronze and wear not the patina of weathered age, but one manufactured in the studio. Natural forms are also highlighted with reverence in Twist of Fate and Revolving, in which the organic and nature-based is juxtaposed with simplified shapes (like the sphere and disc) made from high tech materials such as aluminum or copper. This technique draws attention, by contrast, to the complexity of forms that are derived from and inspired by nature. The totemic or stacked format of many of Thorne’s sculptures also contributes to a reverential tone, making the works seem monumental in intent if not in scale.

Of all the sculptures in this exhibition, Marc Robarge’s works come the closest to mimicking or mirroring nature. Built through the accumulation of bits and pieces of tree bark rescued from expired trees, Robarge’s sculptures, in the artist’s words “look as if they were found in the woods, not made by hand”. Almost. There’s a jaunty edge or maybe a slightly comical and sinister quality to these pieces, something strange that clearly marks them as the work of human imagination and not biology. Their shapes, while distinctly organic and sinuous, are also playfully outlandish. Inner crevices and orifices resonate with curious mystery. These are works that clearly engage our own imaginations, even as they seem humble and so familiar. Robarge has succeeded utterly in transforming mundane, cast-off materials by re-configuring them into highly personal entities capable of transmitting the intrigue, mystery and authenticity of the natural world.

Seen together in a concert of form, texture and color, the works in this exhibition resonate in ways that highlight both their similarities and their separateness. And because each rises in some way from the deep well of inspiration found in the world of nature, a world we all know both by instinct and experience, they each contain something distinctly recognizable to us. Yet they contain surprises and puzzles as well. It is in this combination of the familiar and the new that we are able to find something distinct and eminently memorable.

Nancy Sausser, Curator