Studio visit, Baltimore, MD – March 2025
Anne Clare Rogers is a Baltimore based sculptor. She landed in the mid-Atlantic region in 2017, after graduate school in Texas. Her sister, who is also an artist, came to Baltimore for her graduate studies and pulled Anne to the area, where they now spend time together as a family. Rogers maintains a practice steeped in finding meaning in making art, one that is rooted in explorations of material and form and engagement with her surroundings. She brings light and sophistication to unconventional sculptural methods and overlooked materials. Anne’s studio is on the second floor of a long-running studio building near Baltimore’s train station and Arts District; she’s been there since 2018.
When I visited, abstract sculptures, all at different stages in the creative process, populated her studio. They hung around the space like figures that were all waiting for her next move. Many of them held elusive surfaces, with the materials used not being immediately clear. This aspect of her work often inspires viewers to spend more time looking and thinking. Transitional objects are also a current interest for Rogers. Spending time with her niece and nephew has heightened her awareness of attachment, functionality, and how objects exist in space. Spending time outdoors, going for walks, and observing instances where manmade and natural occurrences collide also all fuel her and creative practice.
Recently, Anne was awarded a Rubys Artist Grant, through the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, for her project Daisy Chain. This project is a continuation of her interest in the environment at large, but also focuses specifically on invasive plants of Maryland. Through a process of collecting and then breaking down the plants and turning them into a sculptural material, she will create a new body of work. During her studio visit we talked about the title of the project, new machinery to aid the process, and what she does with her time not spent in the studio.
Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Anne Clare Rogers
AMY: CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR RECENT WORK? WHAT THEMES AND IDEAS ARE AT THE FRONT OF YOUR MIND?
ANNE: Well, there are a number of things I’m sort of always thinking about, language and meaning making, for example, animal intelligence is another one, alternate ways of knowing, but most recently an idea I’ve been preoccupied with is the concept of transitional objects. For example, a stuffed animal a child might carry to feel more comfortable leaving the house. I was loosely aware of transitional objects before, but now that I am an aunt and I hang out with little kids on a regular basis, I’ve seen them in action. Seeing my niece and nephew hold onto a beloved toy when venturing outside of the house has led me to realize that in a lot of ways, I think my sculptures serve a similar function. In the past I’ve framed this as my sculptures following the models of nourishment, digestion, and assimilation, but these days, I’m more interested in thinking about transitional objects than digestion.
A lot of my creative yearnings and strivings are driven by anxiety and while I’m not sure I can identify precisely what all of those anxieties are, my sculptures are a sort of grappling with persistent but often nebulous feelings. I make sculptures as a way to make sense of the world, of myself, and in an effort to engage with the world by using language that is not just given to me but also created by me. To be clear here, I think of sculpture as a language in and off itself. In a lot of ways I think the whole arc of my studio practice is an effort to resist prescription. I don’t always know what I’m doing or why, but I find that meaning tends to reveal itself if I just give it time in the studio.
Right now I’m quite interested in plant fibers and manipulating them into castable forms. I’m currently in the midst of a project that makes use of non-native invasive plants as a building material.
A: HOW DO YOU ARRIVE AT THE FORMS YOUR SCULPTURES TAKE – IS THERE A DRAWING PROCESS OR IS IT ROOTED IN DISCOVERY?
Anne: I do draw as a way to try and work out my ideas but it’s very rare that my sculptures actually end up looking like the drawings I make. But drawing is definitely a step in the process. The final form an object takes is sort of mysterious even to myself. The forms I arrive at are sort of just a matter of putting in time and eventually being like, okay, this is it. Or working a sculpture until it feels alright. Sometimes the final form is dictated by a deadline and other times the conclusion of a form is more organic. With that said, I tend to go back into sculptures and rework them after I have exhibited them or after I think they are finished. As far as I’m concerned, everything is always up for editing. I don’t think I like the sort of static connotation of calling a sculpture complete or finished. I’m getting a bit off topic, but going back to the question of where my forms come from, a lot of them come from walking around, usually in the woods, and drawing from or straight up copying forms that catch my attention. Going for walks and looking around is probably the most important piece of my process in terms of arriving at the forms I pursue.
For example, those mud things over there– I think are really elegant and beautiful. I found them in a field next to a gas station. I’m quite sure they are the result of a tractor trailer driving through wet ground. The vehicle left behind this long trench with these interesting globs of extruded mud mixed with grass lining the edges of the trench. This find got me thinking about using organic materials like grass, as an aggregate for reinforcing putty-ish materials. That mud and grass mixture is something I have emulated with some of the cast objects I’ve made.
When I go for walks, I don’t set out with the expressed purpose of finding inspiration for sculptures but it seems to be sort of an inevitability. A lot of my prized possessions and objects of inspiration are things that would be conventionally regarded as garbage. I’m not saying this as a critique or value judgment about what constitutes garbage, but a lot of these objects are just things that have literally been thrown away. Like, this [blob]… I found this under a tree on a dune I was walking. When I found a portion of it sticking out of the sand and I didn’t understand what the material was, so I dug it up and examined it. It took me a minute to figure out, but it’s a mop that’s covered in tar. I actually have a couple of them. I am not sure why I keep finding tar mops discarded in nature. I think this one was used for coating the lower portion of electrical posts. The origin of the object is actually not that important to me, the thing about it that holds my interest is its material presence, the slow reveal of what it is. That’s something I try to emulate with my sculpted surfaces.
A: YOU WERE RECENTLY AWARDED A RUBYS ARTIST GRANT, WHAT IS THE PROJECT ASSOCIATED?
Anne: So the title of my project is Daisy Chain. It’s a series of sculptures that I’m making out of non-native invasive plants that I harvest from public land in Baltimore. Maybe two years ago I got certified as a Weed Warrior through the organization Tree Baltimore. It’s a program that trains and authorizes people to remove NNIs (non-native invasive plants) in the city. I’ve volunteered with Weed Warriors and also done NNI removal on my own since getting certified. In my eyes, this past time of land stewardship has a pretty direct link to some of my sculptural interests so it seemed a natural progression to experiment with these plants as a building material. I have no delusion that I am going to eradicate NNIs from parks in Baltimore, but I care about the shared green space here and I take a lot of pride in doing what I can, however futile it can seem, to help preserve our shared wooded areas. The title Daisy Chain is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. A daisy chain can refer to a number of things, but the image it conjures for me is linking multiple extension cords in order to increase the total span electricity can travel. Doing this is haphazard and not advisable, but it is a means to an end. However clunky, daisy chaining is one way to accommodate a specific need. The other image that comes to mind when I think of a daisy chain is more literal, a string of flowers tied together by their stems. I like these dual images and embedded in both is an attendance to changing forms. This is sort of what my project is doing, attending to changing forms. The project is part land stewardship, part material exploration, but I think what I am actually trying to do is closer to writing a love poem.
A: HOW ARE YOU PROCESSING THE PLANTS AND TURNING THEM INTO A MATERIAL YOU CAN USE FOR SCULPTURE?
Anne: Great question. The answer is a work in progress. There are a few different processes I’m using but I am most focused right now on essentially applying the principles of paper making and mold making to these plants. Basically, I bring these plants to my studio, boil them in order to break down the plant fibers and release cellulose. I then run the plant fibers through a machine called a little critter hollander beater. This machine is a round tub you fill with water that is outfitted with a bed of sharp blades and a mill. You slowly beat the fibers into smaller and smaller particles until you have a nice mush. Once the plant fibers have been sufficiently pulped you can pull sheets and press them into molds so that they will dry and hold a three dimensional form.
A: WHERE IS YOUR STUDIO? HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN THERE?
Anne: My studio is in a warehouse building in Greenmount West. I’ve been here since 2018.
A: HOW DO YOU SPEND YOUR TIME WHEN NOT IN THE STUDIO ? HOW DO YOU STRUCTURE YOUR TIME ?
Anne: The number one place I spend my time is at my day job, which is at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I’m the lead Art Packer, which means I prepare and build housing for works in the collection, and I deal with incoming and outgoing loans. I also volunteer at the Station North Tool Library, so I’m occasionally there as a librarian. I spend a lot of time outside. I spend a lot of time with my sister and my niece and nephew, and I also spend a lot of time on the phone with my husband because he doesn’t live in Baltimore.
In terms of structuring my time, there’s a lot of life that needs to be tended to before I can make it to my studio, so I go to the studio when the maintenance of the day to day has been taken care of. I’ve gotten a lot better at valuing and making use of small chunks of studio time. When I finished my MFA program in 2016, I spent a lot of energy fixating on what I believed to be the ideal circumstances for making work. In order to maintain a studio practice I need money, time, and space. The ratio of my access to those ingredients, if you want to call them that, has never really been in a balance I consider ideal. That said, the older I get, the more willing I am to let go of the notion that an ideal, in really any aspect of life, exists. I have gotten much better at recognizing and honoring that little chunks of time really do accumulate; I’m running a marathon, not a sprint.
A: YOU USE A LOT OF ORGANIC MATERIALS ALONGSIDE ARTIFICIAL AND MANMADE ONES. HOW HAVE YOU ARRIVED AT USING SOME OF THE MATERIALS LIKE HUMAN HAIR, POTATOES, HAY, GARBAGE BAGS, ALONGSIDE MORE CONVENTIONAL SCULPTURAL ITEMS LIKE STEEL AND WOOD?
Anne: So in general, I try to have a mindset that any material can be elevated or perform a poetic function. Oftentimes the materials I use are just a matter of committing to what is directly in front of me or what I can afford. The paper sculptures for example, are made from extremely accessible materials and you don’t need any special equipment to do paper mache. I started using hair in part because I also had easy access to it. Sometimes I just want to see a shape or a color and I try not to get too bogged down by trying to understand where that desire comes from.
I enjoy thinking, but I actually think my best work comes from a place absent of thought, or at least conscious thought. Something I do try to do is make sculptures that don’t immediately announce themselves as being the materials that they are. I’m not trying to conceal the way things are made, but I appreciate the slow reveal of information.
A: ANY BOOKS, MOVIES, MEDIA YOU’RE INTO RIGHT NOW? ANYTHING HELPING YOUR CREATIVE MIND THAT YOU WOULD RECOMMEND?
Anne: I mean, going out into the woods is definitely a good start. It doesn’t even have to be the woods. You could just go for a walk. I think going for a walk is the best thing you can do. It’s my favorite pastime. I don’t know if it’s directly influenced my work, but right now I’m reading this book called The Lady Anatomist, which is about this woman. Her name is Anna Morandi Manzolini, and she was one of most important anatomical wax sculptors in the 1700s. And I’m really into her work.
