Artist Talk - Mary Early

Mary Early’s sculptural work using beeswax and wood are fascinating, in that they entail the use of individual, similar-but-not-identical parts to support and buttress one another into a larger whole. It would take a close-up examination to observe the minor differences in the hand-made individual elements, but from a distance the work appears perfectly even and balanced. I appreciated the intricacy and time-intensiveness of her methods, and her deep thought on the characteristics of her materials. The beeswax has its own distinctive, natural smell and color, bringing elements from the external world of plant and animal life into the internal, otherwise-austere realm of the gallery space.

The simplicity of the translucent yellow against the white or black walls and floors draws the viewer into an intimate consideration of an un-enhanced natural beauty – this is also supported by the simplicity of form. Her works usually involve circular structures, whether composed of thick blocks arranged in cylindrical layers, or thinner, stick-like components propped against one another. In both cases, the work conveys the unity of elements that are largely similar but not identical. For me, this conveys the concept of DNA and the great genotypic similarity of humans, and even different species, who exist (at an ideal) in unity despite greater phenotypic variation.

Mary Early also discussed her efforts to convey a large volume with a minimal volume of materials, achieved through the materials’ engineered crutching of one another. She uses the negative space in between parts to create the imaginative space of this bulk in dimension. My favorite piece that she showed was the large cylindrical piece made of long, open-ended, semi-rectangular blocks. This was placed in the middle of a room with black walls and floors, and intentionally altered the course of the audience’s path through the room. It was an art piece you had to work around, that you had to observe – in both senses of the word. This reminded me of an artist Courtney mentioned in her SMP presentation, who created works that intentionally altered people’s passage through the space.

I liked that Mary showed her sketches of brainstorming and project planning, to demonstrate how the ideas that are collapsed onto a two-dimensional space then materialize into three-dimensional reality. This also brought back some of my thoughts on project 1, where we were asked to think of the book, generally deemed two-dimensional for the flat space of the individual page, as a three-dimensional, manipulatable object. Her work makes me want to experiment with carving the book into a boldly three-dimensional sculpture, like many of the artists people have posted on the blog. I thought that this presentation was incredibly inspiring. It’s always interesting for me to hear about sculptural work and the processes behind it, as I am quite unfamiliar with them, but they have such spatial presence and weight in reality.