ROCKLAND, ME.- The Center for Maine Contemporary Art announces the exhibition of Portland, ME based artist, Elizabeth Atterbury, titled Leaf Litter. This exhibition will be on view until September 7, 2025.
Throughout her practice, Elizabeth Atterbury explores the shifting legibility of objects—the way forms can be reworked, recontextualized, and transformed through material and scale. Atterbury’s sculptures emerge through a process that is deliberate and intuitive, embracing both intention and improvisation as ways to engage with history, memory, and personal narrative. In Leaf Litter, she examines how objects carry traces of past lives and accumulate meaning over time—how a shell outlives its inhabitant or how an oversized fan, scaled beyond human use, takes on a mythological presence, its exaggerated form conjuring the feeling of something both familiar and out of reach.
The works in Leaf Litter—rendered in wood, metal, clay, and stone—coalesce into a shared visual language that blurs the boundary between artifact and invention. Some shapes feel immediately recognizable—a lock, a shell, a leaf—while others resist easy identification, hovering between the symbolic and the abstract. Ceramic feet, playful yet sentinel-like, appear as vessels of presence, holding the body, its history, and its weight.
In Atterbury’s work we see a persistent questioning of what is legible, what is coded, and how meaning is constructed and destabilized over time. Objects are imbued with multiple meanings, often inviting viewers to consider how they can retain and release their histories. Like fallen leaves that decay and enrich the soil, the works in Leaf Litter accumulate significance through the act of reinterpretation. Each object functions both as a relic and as a catalyst for renewal. A hand-carved peanut, a pair of articulated fish, a single wooden sandal the size of a table — these forms are more than markers of inheritance. They point to transformation, the potential for growth that is contained within every ending.
Elizabeth Atterbury has exhibited widely, including in solo shows at the Clark Art Institute, Colby College Museum of Art, DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL; and Mrs., Queens, NY. Atterbury’s work is in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Colby College Museum of Art, and CELINE. Since 2017, she has collaborated with Anna Hepler on four Percent for Art projects across Maine. Atterbury received her MFA from MassArt, Boston, MA, and her BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. She lives in Portland, ME.
Leaf Litter was organized by Kate M. McNamara, a curator and educator based in Providence, RI, currently the Interim John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.
