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For over forty years, the concept of MJ.s sculpture has been to offer a strong female voice that addresses the identity of women from our own perspective. She speaks to how it feels to be a woman rather than how we look. Stone gives timeless strength to the message, creating images of both beauty and resilience. MJ expects to continue to carve and create in this vein for her entire career.
"These past few years I have been distilling the message of how I see myself and the world, making abstract sculpture in more essential forms, much of it in onyx marble. Working in my Oregon Coast outdoor studio, affected by weather and seasonal changes, the drama and nuance of light are my collaborators. When first encountering green onyx, I saw and felt water—petrified water. As I cut, grind and polish the onyx, I am allowed not only to give form to the elements of air and water, mists and rain, but also to connect with the ineffable—the cosmos within. Just as the sea or river changes color with the weather or time of day, a sculpture may at times seem to glow from within or show itself as a bold opaque silhouette, creating an ethereal dynamic. Working with themes of water (vessel, well, oasis and reservoir), I address the threat to water on our planet, creating objects to remind us of what we have, what is at stake, and what we are losing. In carving stone to create artifacts of our time, the pandemic has inspired me to address the concept of home. As I work on individual elements to create a whole, the individual houses reference our isolation, and yet combine to form community. In keeping with grouping objects, I recently began carving bottle forms, shifting the idea of liquid vessels to the solidity of stone, metaphorically playing with the need for Heavy Medicine. This series also relates to my fascination with making sculpture to reference famous paintings of objects and sculptures, in this case, referencing Giorgio Morandi's paintings of bottles.:
MJ Anderson was featured in the Summer 2021 Issue of Sculpture Northwest
