A World Both Strange and Familiar
by Chet Domitz via The Provincetown Independent
Anne Clare Rogers bridges the boundaries between machines and matter
Rogers in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center. Photo: Agata Storer
Entering Anne Clare Rogers’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, one is greeted by a subtle whiff of decomposing sea matter. “Yesterday, there was a vat of seaweed pulp in here,” she says. On the floor is a lobster pot Rogers uses to make a slurry of abaca fibers and Codium fragile (the spongy seaweed known as dead man’s fingers) that she collects at low tide.
Nearby is a sculpture in progress: a large vertical disc attached to a long, slightly rusted muffler. The disc is covered on one side with green, fibrous material with speckles and surface irregularities, made from the seaweed slurry. The muffler came from Provincetown Welding Works on Bradford Street.
“I thought it was an elegant form,” says Rogers, who acquired it after the Kacergis family reached out to FAWC and offered this year’s fellows the chance to search for anything useful before the building’s demolition.
“The disc has dried differently than I had envisioned,” says Rogers. “Now I’m trying to decide if I accept this form or if I want to overhaul it and try again to get a smoother curve.”
Rogers, who lives in Baltimore, is a fellow for the second time. She first came to Provincetown in 2017 after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with an M.F.A. in sculpture. Her undergraduate degree from Beloit College was in art history, but then she shifted to creating art rather than studying it.
“Making art was an impulse that I had,” she says. “It was a habit that didn’t go away.”
Experimenting with materials has always been an interest of Rogers’s. “I look around and see what catches my eye,” she says, “and then I’ll try and come up with an idea of how the material might be used in a way that transforms it so that it’s not instantly recognizable. I don’t necessarily want to hide what the materials are, but I want people to be surprised, because I think that’s a way to hold a person’s attention and hopefully get them to be more curious.
