Mayme Kratz: Sleeping in the Forest

Mayme Kratz
Sleeping in the Forest

Exhibition Dates:
January 4 - February 22, 2025

Opening Reception with Mayme Kratz:
Saturday, January 4, 2025
1:00 - 3:00pm

In January 2025, Lisa Sette Gallery will celebrate its 40th season with an exhibition of work by venerated Phoenix artist Mayme Kratz, whose luminous pieces have come to epitomize the transformational nature of Lisa Sette Gallery's commitment to its artist and to the work of revealing new truths about human creativity.

Kratz encases found organic objects in cast resin forms, arranging each precious and often tiny component into breathtaking formations that may resemble expanding galaxies, spreading forests, billowing grasses, or microscopic organisms. A collector of gifts from the ground and an explorer of forgotten places, Kratz does not contrive to replicate a given environment or expound a specific narrative about the places that she finds her archive of fascinating objects. Instead her works present a personal catalog of the vast systems of the natural world: The bleached bones of animals who died in the brush, the roots and seeds and splinters that result when organic systems live and die, multiply and ascend. Infused with poetry and longing, Kratz's arrangements of biological matter in resin are majestic, glowing tributes to the foundational matter of the earth's biological systems.

In the time of quickly accelerating climate change, Kratz has found her own pace as an artist quicken, however the mood of her newest body of work is one of slowing and appreciation, guided by the Mary Oliver poem "Sleeping in the Forest," which begins:

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.

Kratz remarks that the poem is "bringing light and reality into what I consider to be a somber time…when one in three tree species and up to a million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction in the coming decades. It is difficult to witness." And yet, as Oliver's poem and Kratz's work attests, through times of deep darkness and change, beauty persists. Kratz says, "I think my task is to tell the truth and still bring beauty into the world."