Anne Clare Rogers's portfolio

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Work Samples

About Anne Clare

Baltimore City - Station North A&E District

Anne Clare Rogers is a studio-based sculptor. She was a 2017 -2018 Visual Arts fellow at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and a 2015 Summer Fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art. She holds an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the University of Texas at Austin.

View Anne Clare's Resume

Sculptures 01

I make work that privileges the tacit, the inarticulate, or the meanings which can exists 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.

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 model of digestion, nourishment, and assimilation.

Odd as it may sound, I find an analogy between my work and mushrooms. Consider the common names used for the following fungi: dead man's fingers (Xylaria Polymorpha), Hairy Earth Tong (Trichoglossum hirstum), and Black Witche's Butter (Exidia Glandulosa), to name a few. When paging through a field guide to mushrooms and reading these names, I am reminded of Joseph Campbel who, in reference to lirugy described Latin as, "A language that throws you out of your domesticity". I think we should consider Campbell's words in the context of scupture as well. Sculpture—my sculpture—is a language that throws you out of your domesticity.

Sculptures 02

A Potato in Space

Some of Saturn’s lesser moons (which do, in fact, resemble the root vegetable) have been

dubbed “potatoids.” These non-spherical, lumpy satellites are held in their orbit by the
balance of centrifugal force and gravity. This is the structure of their relationship to their
parent planet. There are not, of course, potatoes in space, though I like the thought.
Naming an object draws it closer, makes it knowable (or at least, makes it possible for us to
think we know it). Naming allows us to bridge a gap, though the act of naming also carries
the risk that we will simplify, limit, or reduce what we are trying to understand. At the same
time that we call a small moon a potatoid, we drift further from knowing the reality of the
satellite, its true character.
My work is concerned with meaning-making, time, loss, and death. Calling these satellites
potatoids is itself a metaphor for our attempt to accommodate the unknowable, a comically
familiar name for something far, far from our grasp. Grief is a similar search for the right
name; it lies between the desire for the thing lost and the devastating fact that it is gone. It is in this space—between the wish and the fact—that I seek to locate my work.