From elemental materials like alabaster, quartz, garnet, and bronze, Debra Baxter assembles jewel-like sculptures that explore consciousness, nature, anatomy, and spirituality. For her most recent body of work on view now in Ascent at Roq La Rue, the artist meanders into a more mystical side of history, infused with a tinge of punk and, somewhat paradoxically, a meditative calm.
Baxter contracted Covid in January 2022 that progressed into long Covid, during which she spent more time recuperating than being able to work with the heavy-duty equipment and materials characteristic of her practice. The sculptures on view in this show were initiated five years ago. However, her period of recovery, which she describes as a blessing, revealed an unexpected new direction. As she rested, she began to receive visions that confounded her sense of space, both physically and metaphysically.
Human hearts effervesce with crystals, such as in “The Day I Tried to Live” and “Fade Into You.” On one hand, these could be read as some kind of emotional or biological calcification. On another, these gleaming growths might represent a spilling forth of the spirit made tangible. “Fade Into You” consists of a hinge, allowing the work to become “open-hearted” but also to shut away its gleaming energy.
Baxter also uses materials derived from the earth that are explicitly solid, evoking an intimate tension between vulnerability and strength, the fleeting and the permanent. And in her smaller-than-life-size alabaster busts, she portrays women in an aesthetic representation historically granted to men. “The women depicted in these sculptures are trying to maintain higher consciousness, but keep fracturing and falling apart,” Baxter says. “They stem from my love of the history of sculptures from Greek busts to Bernini, and my interest in the innate truth of materials, and my ongoing belief in the power and intuition of woman.”
Pieces like “Veil” nod to the nature of seeing and awareness while also acknowledging the thinness of the boundary between our world and the next. “Life had a certain amount of permeability in a more spiritual and profound way than before, and she began to feel as if she started to embody the mystical concepts she had been researching,” the gallery says.
Ascent continues through October 3. See more on Baxter’s Instagram.
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