Robert B. Marks: Works and Words: A Personal Anthology

A miniaturist, Marks creates constructions that have an intimacy to them and at the same time contain entire worlds of feeling and existence and memory. Each is a vignette a narrative of a personal nature. She transforms a diverse range of objects and material, 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, immortalize, and to the older tradition of curio cabinets. 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 and inward focus through daily meditation. Embracing solitude is essential to her work. 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. An essay by Marks accompanies a selection of approximately 200 of her most evocative works.