Anne Clare Rogers

Lives and works in Baltimore, MD

Artist statement

I make sculptures that combine found elements such as logs, vines, and chair parts, with handcrafted, heavily labored components. My sculptures are anchored in the real world in the same way that a mushroom anchors itself to a dead tree—reliant on it for nourishment, while, at the same time, breaking down the structure that supports its place in the world. My sculptures, in this sense, take their purpose from the models of digestion, nourishment, and assimilation. My work privileges the tacit, the inarticulate, or the meanings which can exist before language. Meaning is made through shared tools like language, but I also want to consider the ways that these tools can blind us to other possibilities of knowing. I want my sculptures to function as a pathway, if briefly, out of domesticity. For me, the antidote to alienation is rooted in touch. Honoring the impulse to make is an act of faith. My sculptures reflect a world that is located somewhere between the wish and the fact. My work grapples with themes of loss, love, and discreet violence. When selecting materials, I pull from nature for the types of material presences I seek to evoke. My process often involves breaking a material down into its smallest parts followed by reconstitution. Through this transformative process of reordering materials, I am seeking something like hope. In this context, hope appears through the assertion that nothing is fixed.

Artwork