marrow

From the series Pale Dreams, 2009

36″ x 36″, resin and cicada wings on panel

I finished this piece just before my exhibition opened in November. Like many wonderful things, it came out of the night, quiet introspection and a line from a poem. Certain works arrive from a place that feels unstudied, opening a door to a new place, a new path. I am currently working on several pieces that are similar in subject. All things becoming Stars and Dust measures 36″ x 72″ , resin, foxtail agave, snake vertebra on panel. To see other work in the Pale Dreams exhibition go to www.lisasettegallery.com

This work was recently relocated to the new Appaloosa Library in Scottsdale Arizona. Measuring approximately 4′x5′x 3″, it is created with chunks of fractured resin containing sketches and bits of nature.  The chunks of amber resin were recycled from another project, given a new life and a new form. There is a poem hidden within the piece that can only be discovered through close observation.

When we look, for a moment, around the edges of our human travails, we find other forms of life laboring to survive. Insects traverse vast distances and undergo extreme physical changes to become their ultimate selves, roots twist up from the ground in a singular attempt to expand into plants or trees. The artist Mayme Kratz is particularly attuned to these other struggles, and her cast resin pieces speak of the wildness of existence as a whole: the asymmetrical grammar of a fallen tree-limb, the dry language of the cicada, leaving its skin, and at the same time its skeleton, behind.

A collector of biological odds and ends, Kratz winnows metaphorical value from the discards of the natural world. The artist finds her specimens, often parts of dead creatures or fallen flora, while rambling in the high deserts of the Southwest, a place in which life defines itself against the heat. She encases these items in sculptures and wall pieces of rich, deep resin, creating startlingly beautiful reliquaries.

Kratz possesses a biological sixth sense, an understanding of how material she finds can become a line of poetry in the hardscrabble narrative of survival. In her works, bones, broken quail eggs and seed pods, buried in layers of translucent resin and thus transformed into a metaphysical realm, finally surrender their inherently mysterious and magical quality. Kratz sometimes feels that subjects of her artwork discover her rather than the other way around. “Sitting on the desert floor, digging the toenails out of a dead bobcat,” she explains, “You think, ‘there must be a good reason for me to be doing this!’”

Five Weeks in Sunlight, Kratz’s recent collection of work, refers to themiraculous life cycle of the cicada, a creature with which she has recently become obsessed. Kratz notes that for the past year, she’s been storing boxfuls of the insects and their husks in her studio. In her recent work, cicadas flicker and swarm in bottomless oceans of striated resin.“The cicada serves as a metaphor for our own transitions,” says Kratz. The desert cicada found in Phoenix lives alone, buried in the soil for several years before “magically, some internal clock tellsthem it’s time,” and the insects burrow up to the surface to become fertile, winged creatures, and live out their final five weeks aboveground. The more Kratz considered the life of a cicada, the more she noticed measures of five weeks in other applications.When she sets the corpses of plants, insects and animals out to dry, “in Phoenix, it takes about five weeks in the sun before they’re done.” Similarly, she’s begun to recognize emotional intervals of five weeks in her own life and in the lives of her friends and family. 

For Kratz, the meaningful transition is not simply the cicada’s brief spree of flying, mating, and sunshine, but in the way that our physical selves measure out periods of time, the intuitively allotted measurements of light and dark; “We all spend time dwelling in darkness and introspection, and then there are moments when we know it’s time to come into the light.”