I am interested in the weight of a place and the transcendence of a distilled moment.

My sculpture, drawings and installations are often informed by the conditions of a place, the pitch of a roof, the depth of green of a forest, an earthen rubble wall.  I make objects of materials with which I have an intimate visceral connection: industrial felt, wood, vellum, graphite.  These distinct material associations relate to warmth, absorption, silence.  I study repetition, mass and void, physicality and weight, compression and release, within an incremental means of building.

These new works are graphite rubbings of utilitarian elements in my studio: cast iron radiators, wooden box beams and sheared slabs. My use of this technique, frottage, expresses notions of weightlessness, presence, and the marking of time. It is a tactile gesture of locating oneself within a place. This record is as direct as a photograph, and becomes a physical witness to a moment. 

These graphite recordings on vellum, connect ideas of landscape and memory, deconstructing and reconstructing a new sense of place. My interest lies in the contrast of the mechanical means of capturing an image by a camera, and the action of the hand.  The immediacy and stillness of a photograph differs from the slow accumulative process of graphite moving across the surface of an object. The ghostly graphite marks from the industrial felt object draw parallels with the weight of the moment. They register stillness, movement, time and place.

Marcie Miller Gross

Miller Gross received a Master of Fine Arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has held teaching appointments at Kansas City Art Institute and University of Kansas.  She is represented by Haw Contemporary.

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