Debra Baxter:
Love Tears

form & concept | October 2021

Debra Baxter’s solo exhibition Love Tears materializes the entanglement of love, mortality and the natural world. Taking cues from Victorian mourning jewelry, Baxter uses a vocabulary of crystals, minerals, glass and metal to examine how loss, grief and longing have manifested within material culture throughout history. She emphasizes the preciousness of our shared humanity by incorporating anatomical and natural imagery, giving form to the individual and collective grief of the Covid-19 pandemic and other converging crises.

For Baxter’s second solo show at the gallery, the artist presents sixteen sculptures, fourteen of which were created in the past year. Two of the earliest works, a pair of wall sculptures in bronze-cast lace and moss-like green coral, epitomize Baxter’s mesmerizing talent for imbuing durable materials with delicacy and ephemerality. The works are tributes to a friend who passed away, and they provoke a question that Baxter ponders throughout the show: how do you make fleeting things timeless?

Other objects, like After the Storm and Marrow of my Bone, which incorporate a bronze casting of a fox skull and found bones, document the artist’s quest to preserve and commemorate transient states. “There’s inevitable pain in every form of love,” says Baxter. “I’m fascinated by the ways in which we decorate this grief and mourning, and I wanted to see how far I could push myself with balancing the immediate and often ornate demonstration of loss, and my use of permanent materials. This is about loss and legacy.”

“Debra is a master at joining disparate materials,” says Gallery Director Jordan Eddy. “These combinations of made and found objects — some delicate, others impenetrable — explore dynamics between life and death. Love Tears is a clear-eyed meditation on the ways we wear love and loss on our sleeves in stormy times.”

Some works in the show, such as Ear to the Ground, in which a defaced alabaster bust of Aphrodite is fused to an oil lamp, were created during the artist’s 30-day sculpture challenge in the first months of the pandemic. Baxter has also included a new addition to her Crystal Brass Knuckles series, significantly subtitled Forever, whose sister can be found in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.

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