Roberta B. Marks - Works and Words: A Personal Anthology

The first monograph on artist Roberta B. Marks explores her collages and constructions, which focus on the themes of memory, time, and transcendence through a feminist and Buddhist perspective. Marks creates constructions that have an intimacy to them and at the same time contain entire worlds of feeling and memory. Each is a vignette--a narrative of a personal nature. She transforms a range of objects and materials, often of mundane and humble origin, into eloquent and highly personal forms of self- expression. Marks's work speaks to the human impulse to collect, preserve, and immortalize. Her pieces are intuitive and instinctual, exuding a sense of mystery. The viewer enters into an intensely private realm, yet the themes are universal--loss, longing, old age, death, repression, and liberation--thus evoking a feeling of familiarity. A practicing Buddhist, Marks achieves her clarity through daily meditation. She has written "when constructing a work, I pare it down to the essence--the minimal. Each chosen object represents years of seeing with acute awareness." Marks's writings accompany a selection of approximately 200 of her most evocative works.