Life Forms is a sculptural collective of twelve artists and an experiment in artistic community building. Through a series of exhibitions over four years, each in a different location and featuring a different subset of artists, the group aims to deepen relationships with each other and discover new connections through their creative work. The University of Southern Maine Art Gallery has the pleasure of hosting the third exhibition, Life Forms: Grow, featuring Jackie Brown, Leah Gauthier, Elaine K. Ng, and Ashley Page. Running from January 16 – February 15, 2025, the works in this exhibition span a wide range of interpretations around the word “grow”, from the growth of biological life as well as that of knowledge across cultures, to shape-shifting materials that blur the real and the imagined; forging resiliency amidst massive change; and the vulnerability, grace, and complexities of the Black experience.
Artists
Jackie Brown explores how traditional materials like clay can be used in new and unexpected ways through emerging technology. Her iterative sculpture and installation work invites reverence for the natural world and is fueled by an interest in gradual processes of accumulation and erosion.
Leah Gauthier is an intermedia artist who makes wild inspired embroidered paintings, living sculpture, and often edible community works exploring resilience in the wake of climate change, food migration, and her dreams of an interspecies centered future.
Known for material investigation and process-based practices, Elaine K. Ng explores human relationships to place and how we form knowledge, collectively and personally. Informed by a bilingual upbringing, Ng incorporates notions of translation throughout her work, materially, literally, and metaphorically.
Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, Ashley Page’s sculptural practice is a vessel for visibility into human stories and history. Centering the African American experience, Page presents these stories as universal. Merging textile techniques with spatial sensibilities, her work is often a metaphor for the body, a vessel for spirit, or a container for ephemera.