the present tense

During my time working at the Sarasota Art Museum, I’ve had the opportunity to interact almost in a daily basis with the sculptures of artist Martha Posner, featured in the  exhibition Flesh and Bones¹.

More than just observing them, I’ve lived with these figures made from various materials that the artist collected in Martins Creek, the Pennsylvania farm she turned into her open-air studio: beeswax, feathers, animal horns, tree trunks, dry leaves, and even her own hair. Posner’s sculptures seem to breathe with a frantic gasp, like a fish just pulled from the water. Her works, in the process of transformation, wounded and mutilated, seem alive.

Her figures are on the edge of falling or rising, conveying the pain of transformation: the process of becoming something else and learning to move with new limbs new skin, new body… ¿same soul?

These figures, part human, part bird, part deer, part tree, clearly show the process of leaving behind a wounded body and learning to inhabit a new form, while the memory of pain lingers. This imagery draws from various mythologies and creates its own in the deep forest, where Martha also made skins and masks to embody a beast: surrendering herself to the animal and plant kingdoms, to life and its secrets.

In some of her sculptures, the girl’s dresses covered in hair (and hair often continues to grow after death) speak of a skin change. The childhood dresses are left behind, but these shells keep the memory of what was lived.

Posner’s pieces are alive, like everything in the forest, where nothing truly dies and everything is in constant transformation: a feather, a tusk, a branch, bones.

In the forest, there is a kind of ancient magic that comes before human language. Even death in the forest feels different, more sacred; matter is absorbed and reborn. In the forest, the beasts are, in some way, eternal.

Even on the walls and under the museum’s artificial light, Martha’s pieces, which seem like they just came from a dream, carry the memory of the forest. They bring its cries and its peace, a place to heal and transform.

Jesús Miguel Soto

1. In the Flesh and Bones exhibition at the Sarasota Art Museum, Martha Possner’s sculptures and paintings coexist with the photographic work of her late husband, the renowned photographer Larry Fink. ↩︎