Marianne McGrath’s artwork is about returning to the Earth. Her belief in the power of ceramic materials and processes could be taken as a direct reference to her own past. McGrath is a fifth-generation citrus farmer. When she was thirteen the family farm was sold. There is a Wal-Mart in its stead. The farm was relocated and still exists today. Marianne, as the oldest in her family, must feel the pressure of returning. I think she returns through her sculpture. Manifesting memory seems to be McGrath’s chief concern as a sculptor. What is perhaps most striking about her artwork is its ability to speak of memory as a general process of making and remaking meaning. So whose memory is it? Hers? Yours? Mine?

My Hebrew name was Adam. I hated being called Adam by my teachers in Hebrew school. Eventually I renamed myself Aviv, Hebrew for “Spring.” I thought it fit me better. Perhaps I disliked my name because I already had a friend whose real name was Adam, and I felt like an imposter Adam. It could also be that, even at such a seemingly young age, I felt uncomfortable with the resonances surrounding the name of Adam. In Judeo-Christian mythology Adam was the first man. Created from dust, he and Eve were the first to propagate humanity. I think I knew, even at thirteen, this was certainly not my role in this life. Etymologically, Adam is closely related to the Hebrew word for Earth, adamah.

A tree’s root system functions to stabilize and support the trunk. Citrus tree roots are covered with little hairs that soak up water and nutrients from the soil.

The trunk is like the highway of a tree. It is the path through which water absorbed by vast root systems makes its way to the branches and stems. The trunk reveals age, marks climate, and sometimes bears a more human mark – letters cut right into the bark, expanding at the same rate the trunk expands. A little kid in a citrus grove carves, “Adam wuz here.”

Perhaps it is so difficult to describe Marianne McGrath’s works because it is difficult to describe the process of memory. One thing is for certain, memory is not a stable thing. We are always losing it or, conversely, it is failing us. Memory is fuzzy and unclear. We do not know when or where memories will be made, just that they are.

This exhibition marks the first time that McGrath has consciously chosen to utilize tree imagery. In some ways this new trend is a logical extension of the material McGrath uses; after all, dirt and clay give way to plant life in the natural world. Trees also connote genealogy, which is our way of connecting and diagramming our past. The trees in this installation hover over and protect the bulbous forms below. The plexiglass (the only industrial material McGrath uses) is the mediator, the ground and the horizon.

This essay has been an experiment in grafting, an experiment in genetically modifying content into blocks and bits, helpful and superfluous. Citrus trees hybridise easily, and so we have a wide variety of citrus fruits available for our consumption, easily purchased from bodegas, fruit stands, grocers (local, organic, national), and Wal-Marts across America. Marianne presents the viewer with the beauty of her medium, of living and working closely with a material so resonant that, in the end, all that’s left to do is shape it. Meanings are carried through, around, and in spite of McGrath’s medium, and like memory, we claim and take our own memories, bring them out to play, and hope that they have something to do with one another. Maybe I’ll go back to being Adam.