ELIZABETH ATTERBURY
With her exercises in material alchemy and appropriations of existent forms Elizabeth Atterbury demonstrates a fluid studio practice, which moves between picture making and object making.
Atterbury’s images consist largely of impermanent constructions arranged and photographed in the studio. Drawn to materials such as paper and sand, she constructs ephemeral tableaus specifically for the purpose of transfiguring and recording them. The artist’s sculptural works represent a confluence of the physical and the depicted. They are allegorical expressions, and they are props for a still life. Constructed from cut plywood and individually raked with tile mortar, like brush strokes, Atterbury’s wall works are reconstructed and puzzled together, rejoining the carved glyphs as one complete narrative; cumbersome and airy, these works echo the sculptures they surround.
Fascinated with the autonomy of the artifact – objects disassociated from their original function and context – Atterbury’s practice considers the distinction or lack thereof between artifact, prop, model and sculpture. The work is not only symbolic and representative, but it demonstrates how history, memory and imagination conspire in generating abstract personal iconographies.
Elizabeth Atterbury (born 1982, West Palm Beach, FL) lives and works in Portland, Maine. Recent solo and group shows include Mrs., Maspeth; Kate Werble Gallery, New York; The Portland Museum of Art, Portland; The Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville; kijidome, Boston; DOCUMENT, Chicago; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; The Luminary, St Louis; Et al. Etc., San Francisco; Pulaski Park Field House, Chicago; Able Baker Contemporary, Portland; Ida Schmid, Brooklyn; TSA, Brooklyn; Bodega, Philadelphia/New York; KANSAS, New York; and The ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, among others. She received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from MassArt.
Atterbury is represented by Mrs., Maspeth, NY and DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL.
Anonymous Old Poem II, 2018
Mortar, Plywood and Glue
33 x 27 x 1 in
Courtesy of Mrs. Gallery
Moms, 2018
Mortar, Plywood and Glue
15 x 12 x 1 in
Courtesy of Mrs. Gallery
Beads I, 2018
Peach Pits
77 x 1 x 1 in
Courtesy of Mrs. Gallery
Two Wangs, 2017
Mortar, Plywood and Glue
15 x 12 x 1 in
Courtesy of Mrs. Gallery
“I need to remember things but I also need to keep the future open. Just because an object lived one life doesn’t mean it cannot live another.”
— Elizabeth Atterbury
“Strands made of sanded peach pits similar to prayer beads have been made at times in between more active moments in the studio. The repetitive and automatic operation of creating these works has granted space for focus or daydreams of what is to follow. They are produced as an act of meditation and progress while ideas generate and gestate.”
“My work is visually very formal and I think it has a politics to it as well. But I reach both of these places through autobiography. I start with the forms in my own life.”
— Elizabeth Atterbury
“I keep thinking about my mom and her two children, and me and my two young kids now. Two forms held by one. And then to think that my kids were inside my mother’s body too, as eggs, inside my body, inside her womb. Another layer of nesting.”
…
“Even last night, when I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep, my mind drifted … to thinking about the arrangement of bodies on the bed. My husband, straight and tight against one edge; my son, crooked along the top of the bed, head under a pillow; my daughter, a small hyphen in the middle of the mattress; and me, my body snaking around my daughter and the cat, tucked behind my knees. I thought of this arrangement not from my tangled, immersed perspective, but from above.”
— Elizabeth Atterbury