A thoughtful artist with a strong record of exhibitions - and an alumna of both Skowhegan and MacDowell - MaryKate Maher makes lyrical and compelling sculptures and installations work with acute awareness of forms and structures. Her practice is rooted in an enduring interest in landscape, geological phenomenon and improvised forms of site-markings. Throughout her works, gradients play with the viewer’s sense of volume and dimension, and the repetition of specific forms create a unique visual grammar.

Maher’s work and living space had immediate implications for the collage work she made during the quarantine; they branched out of the work she was doing right before the pandemic. Being stuck in a small apartment with her family, all of them on top of each other, she would sneak away and sit on her windowsill and stare out at the world below - listening to the intense quietness, watching the sunsets, seeing the birds and “spying” on neighbors using their roofs for exercise. She thought a lot about light, space and bodies. The colors she was working with were magenta, pink and red -they felt bodily and intensely oversaturated. Maher’s previously neutral palette evolved in this recent work. As she starts to get back to the studio, she sees the work continuing in a new direction as she conceptualizes the meaning behind them: cut forms, saturated colors and finding new ways to create space through flat planes.