Deep care and connection define Elizabeth Atterbury’s sculptures and their arrangements. Visually stunning surfaces, created in wood, clay, metal, and stone, are felt through the body. As we unpack complex strands of meaning conveyed through nuanced formal decisions of material and scale, it becomes clear that her objects, whether instantly recognizable or more ambiguous, tap into something within the psyche. Independent yet interconnected, they form a language of memory, history, and possibility. How exactly we interpret that language depends on our reading of cultural patterning and inherited wisdom. Her “stages,” whether the floor itself or custom platforms, become a scaffolding for forms that can change over time, artifacts that reveal traces of past lives and accumulated significance, their scale shifts emphasizing change, distortions, and new beginnings.
Atterbury’s arrays ask for, and reward, our attention, both visually and conceptually. Sculptural collages in space, they reframe our surroundings, asking us to enter into their dialogue and connect with forms and associations that blend the individual and the collective, the conscious and the unconscious, the familiar and the tantalizingly beyond reach.
Joshua Reiman: I’m curious about the aesthetics of your work and how it is concentrated within a framework or stage. How did this kind of presentation come about? Are the objects performing?
Elizabeth Atterbury: I started making photographs in college, but toward the end of graduate school, I was beginning to feel restless only working photographically. I moved back to Portland, Maine, into a shared studio space with an attached woodshop and was making pictures of temporary still-lifes. As the props became more developed and dimensional, it felt like I was documenting the forms I’d built as opposed to building the forms in service of the photograph. . .
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