Biography from AskART:
| A resident of Phoenix, Arizona, Mayme Kratz works both in resin and blown glass, having become much interested in glass in 1998 during a residency in Pilchuk in Washington state. Her pieces are intended to capture nature in transparent structures.
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The following is submitted by Julie Sasse, author of the catalogue for the Mayme Kratz exhibition "Waking in the Dark" at the Joseph Gross Gallery, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 1999.
Mayme Kratz's sculptures and wall constructions speak of soulful longing, poignant loss, and promise of rebirth. Less trapped than preserved, she suspends seed pods, insect wings, cactus roots, decayed birds and their abandoned nests, often embodying them in the form of spheres, houses, and wall panels. Inspired by her dreams, these highly personal works communicate with their sensitivity to nature and humankind.
Subtle tinting of the resin adds to the qualities of life-giving forces that are imbued in these deeply touching works. Kratz positions these objects, which she finds on desert walks, with careful thought and precision, exposing the topmost layer to reveal what's inside. The revelation becomes a symbol of liberation and discovery in the depiction of cycles of nature and the passage of time.
Boats are a new form in the artist's vocabulary. Evolved from recent work in glass, she now casts them in her familiar material of resin. Exile is a series of boats that hold objects intimate to the artist. This installation tells of a journey into the unknownleaving everything behind for uncharted territory. It is a journey we all take in one form or another with the same sense of wonder and trepidation. Mayme Kratz is not afraid to bare her soul through her work and thus touches our own.
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The following is from the essay "Intimate Discoveries" by Julie Sasse in the book "therefore," an exhibition publication by the Tucson Museum of Art.
Mayme Kratz was born in San Diego County and raised in the mining town of Julian, a small mountain community known for its orchards. She had an idyllic childhood with plenty of time to explore nature, tend the family garden, ride horses, and hike in the dense woods behind her house. She developed a life-long interest in life and death cycles of animals.
She also showed an early art interest. During her teen years, she worked for a nursery in Escondido, but returned to Julian to work with James Hubbell, a noted local artist and architect who merged an interest in nature and mixed media. With Hubbell, she had a five-year apprenticeship, 1979-1984, and learned to make constructions from glass and to work with bronze, mosaic tiling and to experiment with a variety of materials. "Influenced by Hubbell, the colorful qualities of glass and its luminescence became the focus of her own work......(12).
In 1984, Kratz went to Scotland to build a glass facade designed by Hubbell of the Universal Hall building in Findhorn. She also traveled to France, Switzerland, and Italy, and then married and lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico near Canyon Road, the art gallery district. She began a series of self portraits and figurative abstractions, inspired from her new interest in after-death experiences prompted by her reading of the "Tibetan Book of the Dead."
Although she loved the land and culture of New Mexico, a growing market for her work in the Phoenix area led to her move there, and shortly after she was exhibiting her work at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Her art continued to develop including landscapes that "focused on an eerie light source--an ethereal glow that emanated from an undefined place." (13)
Her materials were saturated with dark pigment and included fluids, papers and wax, and in 1990, she began her small-house looking, three-dimensional forms with polymer resin that have become her signature works. These shapes have pitched roofs, are four sided, and are on stilts---suggestive of the icon of the American home that is a safe haven. ". . .the isolated house forms also signify solitude and isolation, referencing the individual, both in body and thought." (14).
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