Terry Maker uses alchemy -- and a few old shoes -- to forge works with soul
Mar. 29—Sculptor and mixed media artist Terry Maker is musing about the many skills she's developed over the years. She's proficient at using saws, drills, and all manner of heavy equipment, and her husband, Chris Rogers, specializes in robotics for his career.
Living in Louisville, Colorado, they're friendly neighbors. But if the world ever shifts to post-apocalyptic, they might be your best friends.
"We're all ready. We've got our robots and all our tools," Maker says, laughing. "You might want to come here if it happens. We'll take you in."
The Abilene, Texas, native's Distance and Desire is currently on exhibition at the Ray Drew Gallery at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, her first time bringing a show to the state. Some of her works resemble vertical mosaics, standing walls of reclaimed materials arranged in repeating geometric patterns. Another of her pieces is a sphere made of cowboy and cowgirl hats arranged inward. (Maker has another cowgirl hat piece, which is 10 feet in diameter, at the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie, and a smaller one is on display in Las Vegas.)
Maker considers herself part archaeologist and part alchemist. She takes materials like old shoes, straws, or religious documents and will shred or drill into them, taking them apart to see what they look like on the inside. Then she amalgamates them into a dense papier mâché mass and embeds them with resin and other found materials.
details
Terry Maker: Distance and Desire
* Through April 26
* Ray Drew Gallery, New Mexico Highlands University
* 802 National Avenue,900 University Avenue, Las Vegas
This form of making art, she says, is an expression of her own internal journey. Maker suffered from depression for years before she found medication that worked for her, and now she says her creative life — and the works that result from it — are an expression of her joy.
"A lot of my work is about the contrast between what we see on the outside and what is deeply inside," she says. "I started to think about, 'What's going on in my psyche and in my spiritual life? What's underneath the surface?' It's very much a reflection of my life of introspection. I find myself digging and scraping and drilling tons of holes. Gazillions of holes."
Maker, who has a master's degree in education from Texas Tech University in Lubbock and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado in Boulder, was born to be crafty. Her father, Red Maker, was an entrepreneur who built three mom-and-pop style motels — by himself. He even started his own small airport, Maker Air Park in Abilene, and was a pilot and flight instructor.
As a young girl, Maker often sat and watched him.
"He could invent anything. If there was a tool he needed and it wasn't out there, he would make it," she says. "I think he was a huge inspiration for me, and I remember as a little girl playing and working along with him hammering stuff. He began my love of tools and making, even though my name is Maker. That's a real name."
The act of making art is a physical one for Maker; she likes to get her hands dirty and finds the physical force of sculpting to be satisfying. She points to her "beautiful guns," which came out of the art she's made over the decades.
Two of the pieces in Distance and Desire use an uncommon material — scraps from used shoes — as the primary ingredients. One of the pieces is a wall triptych named All Soles, which features irregular-shaped shoe cutouts standing out against a stone-colored background. Maker says she found the material that went into All Soles by accident. She took several of her friend's shoes to Baseline Shoe Repair and Leatherworks in Louisville, Colorado, and was shocked to see all the discarded material on the floor. So she asked the man behind the counter, Fernando, what he did with shoes that were beyond repair.
"There were some cut and some shredded because he took the soles off. He said, 'You can have them,'" she says. "We started this whole relationship of me coming in every month and collecting these shoes. One time he said, 'Do you want the shoe dust?' And I said, 'Of course I want the shoe dust.' The shoe dust is literally in All Soles; I mixed it in the amalgam."
Ray Drew Gallery head curator Gina Hartmann says Maker's show represents the first time an exhibit has spilled into the hallway. Maker's six-panel wall piece stands near the gallery entrance, and once you're inside, the two walls are dominated by horizontal sculptures.
All Soles is on one wall, and on the wall immediately facing it is a piece with a dark background titled Maker Veil. Her cowgirl hat piece — called Rolling Westward — rests on the ground and rises a few feet into the air.
Only the bottoms of the hats and the insides are visible on the outside of the sphere; viewers can't see the brims or crowns so may not know they're hats until they take a closer look. But Maker says the work offers more than meets the eye.
"That's my feminist piece. The phallus, so to speak, is taking a second step; it's on the interior of the form and the orifice is on the outside," she says. "You walk up to it, and you're astounded by the curiosity. When you come upon it, you see. It's the curious little thing the crown of the hat makes when you look inside it."
