The Museum of Art Fort Collins presented “Terry Maker: In Which the Progeny of the Hero Shapes the Dust,” made with materials ranging from jawbreakers to graphite.

Terry Maker is a mixed media artist with a focus on “works emerging from humble origins,” she said. Maker has been working for 40 years to manipulate and shrink down the universe into visual sculptures, assemblages and drawings. 

“I’ve been making art most of my life, since an early age,” Maker said 

“I explore the process of art-making while addressing themes relating to human desire and decay, death and resurrection and mundane and sacred and mark-making — both literal and figurative.” -Terry Maker, mixed media artist

The exhibit is open until Jan. 7, 2024.

Maker’s works are made from both discarded and regular art materials to show just how vast and ethereal existence is. Once Maker makes her assemblages, she does graphite drawings of them. 

“I do the wall sculpture assemblage first, and then it becomes a source and the mother of the drawing,” Maker said. “I use the sculpture’s textural surface to make a rubbing, recording all the interesting cracks, fissures and surface details and go from there. A lot of the works in this show have this familial relationship. Although the rubbing/drawing was drawn from the original sculpture, it becomes a unique piece in and of itself, going through many phases of graphite, Prismacolor and acrylic treatments.” 

Cheryl Rogers is the director of exhibitions at the Museum of Art Fort Collins and received her BFA in printmaking and sculpture at Colorado State University. Rogers is responsible for the safe travel of Maker’s artwork. 

“(Maker) is very driven, and I know most of the work in this gallery was done in the last two years,” Rogers said.  

Maker works on a large-scale circular shape for almost all of her projects. 

“I explore the process of art-making while addressing themes relating to human desire and decay, death and resurrection and mundane and sacred and mark-making — both literal and figurative,” Maker said. “In all my work, I intend to pull viewers into these universal tensions, to stimulate novel, transcendent responses to the existential questions behind humanity’s search for meaning. The revealed surfaces present the viewer with a visual puzzle, made even stranger by its unique visual vocabulary, that opens the possibility of new connections, new perspectives.” 

Maker devotes countless hours to all her works, but she does have a few pieces she is especially proud of. 

“I’m particularly attracted to my works called ‘Field Lines’ and their rubbings,” Maker said. “This series references the invisible electromagnetic currents and energy that runs through much of the organic world.”

Gail DiVico is a volunteer at the museum and helps to teach some of their classes and set up the galleries in between exhibits. 

DiVico’s favorite piece in the collection is called “Thirst.”

“I love this wall sculpture; it’s very dimensional and reminds me of outer space,” Divico said. “I would put that in my house any day. Her work is astonishing.” 

Students of CSU and Front Range Community College get into the museum for free. Tickets are $10 for adult nonmembers and $8 for senior nonmembers.