Elizabeth Atterbury’s Sculptures Disrupt the Familiar in “Leaf Litter”

In “Leaf Litter,” Elizabeth Atterbury transforms the ordinary into the uncanny. On view at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, her sculptures, crafted from wood, clay, stone, and metal, evoke everyday objects made strange: a single sandal so oversized it might pass for a dinner table; a collection of unnaturally pristine leaves and shells—not ephemera from a daily stroll, but objects that seem everlasting. Two giant fans appear in the space, one sprawled across the gallery floor and another folded and hanging on the wall—each too large to function, their use rendered unknowable. Nearby, a pair of ghostly feet seems to hold the place for whoever these trinkets might belong to. Everything feels familiar, but not quite right—charged with a quiet tension between permanence and fragility, presence and absence.

The title references the material remains that carpet forest floors—dead leaves, bark, twigs. These fragments are what’s left after a life cycle has ended and before the next begins. That logic of shedding, settling in, and beginning again runs throughout the show. Forms feel dug up, not constructed; the cracked clay resembles bark, while smooth wood mimics porcelain. Atterbury keeps her materials flexible and ambiguous, letting them speak across categories. Her surfaces invite touch. Her objects engage scale. Sometimes you feel like a participant; other times like you’ve stumbled into a world too large or too small for you. The floor itself operates like a canvas, collecting these forms into quiet visual conversations. Viewers are invited to look down, peer around, and sometimes crouch, shifting their scale to meet the objects on their own terms.

There is a minimalist sensibility here—clean lines, repetition, and a matter-of-fact presentation. But where minimalism often insists on neutrality, Atterbury’s restraint feels intimate. A MassArt alum now based in Portland, Atterbury has long explored ideas of perception, practice, and what is passed down, drawing from personal histories and her Chinese American background. In “Leaf Litter,” these themes are not literalized but embedded. The sculptures function like tokens—things with a past but no single point of origin. Rather than illustrating memory, Atterbury allows materials to hold it. The works never announce their symbolism. Instead, they prompt slow looking and sustained attention. Their logic is more archaeological than narrative: not a linear story but a layered inquiry into how objects absorb experience. What do we preserve? What changes over time? What gets lost?

“Leaf Litter” is a meditation on what resurfaces, what resists, and what quietly endures. But more than that, it is a show about staying with an object—learning to notice not what it stands in for, but what it is: surface, form, presence. The works neither mimic reality nor escape it. They assemble, suggest, and quietly hold space for new understanding.

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“Leaf Litter” is on view through September 7, 2025, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME.