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Things to Do in Seattle: Sculptor Debra Baxter’s New Show ‘All I Ever Wanted’
Seattle sculptor Debra Baxter conveys the pull of gravity with a light touch
By Seattle Mag April 7, 2014
This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Seattle magazine.
!–paging_filter–pDebra Baxter is renowned for creating work that contrasts spiky crystals against smooth stone, stunning beauty against repulsive physical reality. Her new show,em All I Ever Wanted/em, features alabaster, crystal and mineral sculptures, as well as cast metal pieces, including a twisted human neck made of aluminum and a female pelvis in bronze. But the centerpiece is “Soft Landing (or crashing and burning),” five life-size alabaster pillows meticulously carved and arranged as a 3-D replica of Albrecht Dürer’s 1493 drawing “Six Studies of Pillows.” Baxter came upon the drawing while researching Dürer for an art history class she was teaching, and it brought to mind a pillow she had carved in 2009, and previous sculptural works, such as her textile clouds. “The pillows reach back to these earlier metaphorical explorations of lightness and weight,” she explains. “The pillows in Dürer’s drawing seem to wrestle with their own physicality. Contorting and stretching in impossible ways, they anthropomorphize a human struggle.” While Dürer’s drawing has six pillows, Baxter created five—but not because she grew tired of the punishing process. “So much of my work is about what is missing,” she says. “I wanted there to be an absence.” 3/27–4/22. emTimes vary. Free. Platform Gallery, 114 Third Ave. S; 206.323.2808; a href=”http://www.platformgallery.com” target=”_blank”platformgallery.com/anbsp; /em/p
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Feeding Ghosts to Free Them
Artist Tessa Hulls creates a revealing graphic novel to help her deal with childhood trauma
Seattle artist Tessa Hulls’ new graphic novel Feeding Ghosts is a deeply stirring narrative of loss, mental illness, and intergenerational trauma. She says that she wrote it to answer this question: What broke my family? Much of the book is about repetition, and how three generations of women in Hulls’ family were emotionally crippled by
