Full Circle

Littleton Museum, June-August 2018

Terry Maker’s stunning body of work is steeped in fascinating dualities. She mines commonplace materials, cutting, aggregating, and finally re-combining them into dense and irresistibly tactile wall reliefs and free standing sculptures. Her practice of construction, deconstruction, and re-assembly, while very labor intensive, generates objects that seem to have effortlessly built themselves.

Surging through this work, the circle becomes a both a building block and a formalist end in itself. Viewers will begin to notice dozens of ways this geometric figure is put to task, and the wide spectrum of objects and effects it generates.

The “Eye Rolling” series layers shredded paper targets into flattened rings, which further contain black irises traveling in fixed orbits at their centers. The patterned effect, both Baroque and extra-terrestrial, targets our gaze at a center void, while urging us back to its ornate periphery. “Pointless” converts hundreds of combined drawing tools, markers, pens, and pencils, into magical, molecular worlds, igniting a dissonance between common objects and unknown particles. The “Jawbreaker” series embeds spherical candies in a resin matrix, their surfaces ground flat to reveal colorful cross-sections. Resembling fantastical droplets at the surface of an unknown sea, richly colored circular bands invoke both inner and outer space.

Driving these transfigurations is a sense of wonder about the world, and a confidence that viewers will experience something new. Look closer, she seems to ask, and be transformed yourself. Terry’s keen craftsmanship rewards that closer look. Her unique co-extension of subject and object underlies the elements of memory embedded in these shredded and re-combined objects.

Nowhere is this connection clearer than the “Small Album Sides” series. Vinyl LPs have been shredded and repackaged into radiating lines of warp speed motion. Exhibited with the original album covers, Terry Maker infers an otherworldly destiny for the common stuff of nostalgia and remembrance. Maker’s creative process itself follows a similar profile, as she returns again and again to something primal and restless, hewn from everyday materials.

Kevin Oehler
Curator of Exhibits, Littleton Museum