NOTRE DAME, IN.- These beautiful landscapes are the artist’s personal “maps” of time spent within nature, formal equivalents to the experience of moving through the landscape. She combines “materials and methods that are, in themselves, directly extracted from the earth and which interact in ways that are inherent to their physical properties.” That is, the paintings are created from natural materials (clay, fiber, and pigments), where shapes, patterns, and forms are revealed through natural processes––such as evaporation causing clay to dry and crack, and gravity moving water-based pigments across sloped canvases.

Mattes will also install an evaporation pool within the gallery. Liquid clay will be poured into a clay basin on the gallery floor. As the water evaporates from the clay over days and weeks, the various clays used will create distinct cracking and tonal patterns.

"I am interested in expanding my understanding of 'landscape.' The pastoral perspective that had been developing since the 14th century in European landscape painting became a tradition wherein the landscape existed as a backdrop for depictions of human activities, secular and religious. As 'scenery,' an appropriately theatrical term, the treatment of landscape as a backdrop set the 'stage' for what was considered the more important and dominating theatre of the human narrative. Further treatment of landscape in the periods of Romanticism, Impressionism, and progressively onward, focused more on individualistic expression of subject matter. Certainly, J.W. Turner, who so poignantly focused on the romantic sublime, figures clearly in my list of influences", writes Danae Matthes in her artist's statement.