Terry Maker’s giant ball of cowgirl hats is a formidable piece of art. There are more than 500 straw hats in all, turned brim-up and assembled into a sphere 10-feet in diameter. It’s massive.
The piece, in one form or another, has been rolling around the region — and the artist’s head — for about 15 years, since she debuted it at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art as an outdoor installation that was left to disintegrate in the elements.
The current iteration is the star attraction of “Because the World Is Round,” a retrospective of Maker’s work currently at the Longmont Museum. It continues to pack a punch, in part because a viewer wonders how the heck she made it.
If you go
“Terry Maker: Because the World is Round” continues through May 17 at the Longmont Museum, 400 Quail Road, Longmont. There’s an admission charge. Info at 303-651-8374 or longmontmuseum.org.
The answer: by hand, of course, like everything else in a body of work that is both “labor-intensive and complicated,” as the artist describes it, but also wildly entertaining.
“This whole idea of play is really important to me, a sense of whimsy and wonder,” Maker said in an interview last week. “And yet when you peel back the layers, the underbelly can be dark and foreboding.”
That’s Maker’s magic, really, hiding odd, sometimes uneasy, surprises below polished surfaces. She’s probably known best for her jawbreaker pieces, for which she takes extra-large, ball-shaped jawbreaker candies, 2 or 3 inches in diameter, and cuts them into thin slices, then floats them in a field of resin. The end result is a glossy, two-dimensional object that can resemble planets and other celestial bodies floating in deep space.
And she’s soon to be known for this one, in the current show: “Self-portrait in Tootsie Roll Pop (with Wrapper).” For that, she cast her own head in resin to mimic the chewy center of the popular lollipop. She used red plastic to serve as the candy coating and propped it off the ground with a wooden stick. It’s 6 feet tall.
Powerful work, made with power tools, like drills, saws, scrapers and sanders in Maker’s studio, located at her home in Louisville.
“I feel like the traditional tools of art-making are important,” said Maker, paying polite homage to ordinary things like paintbrushes and clay — though she’s just as likely to plug her tools into electrical sockets.
“I think those things are as important as things like chainsaws, and I use them all.”
It’s not just eye-candy. Maker explores rich ideas. Several pieces in the show are constructed from shredded documents. Some she collected from pamphlets at her church; others are research documents she procured from a local physicist and an astronomer. The paper is arranged into patterns and, again, fixed in resin, to create a two-dimensional object that hangs on the wall.
The process-driven works explore the relationship between science and religion, forcing these “assumed opposites to live together,” as she puts it, and inviting viewers to reconcile the commonalities and conflicts between things they believe in.
She also dives into current events. One piece, “Trigger,” looks like an exploding firework of guns, with dozens of rifle barrels shooting out from a center point to create a sphere, about 5 feet in diameter. It’s comedic, bordering on ridiculous.
“I made some homemade guns out of wood blocks and then I found some toy guns,” she said, explaining how the piece came to be. “Then I cast them in rubber. Then I would pour this high density polyurethane foam on them.”
Maker has lived in Colorado for decades but she was born and raised in Texas, where the gun culture is strong. With “Trigger,” she means to bring some common sense to the extreme proliferation of weaponry in society. “This kind of braggadocio of ‘my guns are bigger than your guns’ is not true power,” she said. “It’s false and it’s ruining our world.”
Another piece is made with “thousands and thousands of awful plastic straws,” she said.
As for the giant hat, it’s a feminist manifesto, though loaded with levity and double meanings. You could see the raw material as 500 hats or — inverted, as they are, so the interiors are most visible — as 500 orifices. Either way, they are transformed into an awesomely powerful object.
Creating it required some human and monetary resources. “I had to economize, and so even these cheap hats were very expensive,” said Maker. “And they came without the necessary brown sweat bans.”
“There I was with my glue gun, gluing 500 sweatbands like crazy. It was maddening.”
As an exhibit, “Because the World Is Round” — organized by Maker, working closely with Longmont’s Curator of Exhibitions Jared Thompson — covers a lot of ground, though she brings it all together in a few key ways.
First, she has expanded some existing works for the show, creating miniature versions of the signature pieces “Trigger” and “Cowgirl Hat Ball.” (Both pieces were recently on display at Robischon Gallery in Denver, where I saw them in advance of the Longmont show.)
The smaller versions are nearly identical, though about one-third the size of the originals, and they are positioned right beside each other in Longmont. They are offspring of a sort; Maker wanted to make a point about the speed of the expansion of ideas these days.
There’s also the round theme. Everything in the exhibition has some circle or sphere as a component. Circles have no beginning and no end, and that serves to connect the show’s various concepts. They are also the shape of drilled holes and, as an artist whose work is particularly hands-on, Maker has been drilling into things both intellectually and physically her whole life, yearning to get to the center to explore and understand.
“I got in trouble in first grade because I used my Husky pencil to punch holes in my cigar box,” she said, referring to the container for her kid craft supplies. “I’ve been using that as a formal and conceptual device forever.”
But there’s another link within the Longmont display that, as a critic, I’ve noticed in Maker’s art for years: Within their frivolity, her objects hold complicated ideas about the human condition — things like anxiety, ambition, illness, fear, inequality, a search for logic. It is darkness, gently delivered.
It’s fun to picture her with the glue gun, but challenging to consider the ideas of oppression she’s exploring in the piece. Or to consider why someone would cast her own head in resin and display it in a cloud of candy haze. That’s not how most people would make a self-portrait.
Not everything is so serious, but a lot of it — surprisingly — is. And it reflects the struggles Maker has seen and also experienced herself. She’s been upfront for a long time about her own battles with mental illness.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” she said. “It’s built an unusual foundation for me, and I’m gonna use everything in this work, even me.”
As with paintbrushes and buzz saws, it’s just another tool. Legit, useful and, like her giant ball of hats, imposing, impressive, formidable.
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February 02, 2020 at 08:00PM
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Terry Maker's “Cowgirl Hat Ball" is the star of this Longmont Museum show - The Know
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