Leaf Litter | Elizabeth Atterbury
Curated by Kate McNamara
May 24, 2025 – 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 both deliberate and intuitive, embracing improvisation and intention 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 distortions of memory and 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, one that blurs the boundary between artifact and invention. Some shapes feel immediately recognizable—a lock, a shell, leaves—while others resist easy identification, hovering between the symbolic and the abstract. Ceramic feet, both playful and sentinel-like, appear as vessels of presence, holding the body, its history, and its weight.

Atterbury’s interest in how objects function as markers of history and transformation resonates with the poetic explorations of Monica Youn, whose collection From From considers how language is shaped by inheritance, dislocation, and the constraints of cultural expectation. In both Youn’s poetry and Atterbury’s sculptures, there is a persistent questioning of what is legible, what is coded, and how meaning is both constructed and destabilized over time. The layered references and complex histories embedded in Youn’s poems align with Atterbury’s practice, where objects are imbued with multiple meanings, often inviting viewers to consider the ways these objects both retain and release their histories.

Like fallen leaves that decay and enrich the soil, the pieces in Leaf Litter accumulate significance through the act of reinterpretation. Each object functions not only as a relic but also as a catalyst for renewal. A hand-carved peanut, a pair of articulated fish, a single wooden sandal so large it can be confused for a table—these works are markers of inheritance, but they also point to transformation, the potential for growth within endings. In Atterbury’s hands, seemingly ordinary objects become conduits for something larger: a collective memory that reaches beyond the individual, a shared story woven into the fabric of materiality.

This collaborative interaction between objects mirrors Atterbury’s broader interest in the idea of a language of forms—one that evolves, responds to its environment, and invites participation. The objects in Leaf Litter are not static markers but sites of engagement with past, present, and future. By drawing viewers into this process, Atterbury positions her sculptures as living texts. In this way, Leaf Litter becomes not only a meditation on the passage of time but a reclamation of making itself. Atterbury invites us to reconsider the boundaries between life and art, between what we hold onto and what we allow to slip away.

-Kate M. McNamara

About the artist

Elizabeth Atterbury (b.1982, Florida) is an artist based in Portland, Maine. Solo exhibitions  include The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville,  ME; DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL; and Mrs. Maspeth, NY. Group exhibitions include The  Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA;  Portland Museum of Art, Portland ME; CMCA, Rockland, ME; Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, St.  Augustine, FL; The ICA at MECA&D, Portland, ME; Sarah Brook Gallery, Los Angeles, CA;  Dunes, Portland, ME; Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY; and  Bodega (Derosia), New York, NY among others. Atterbury’s work in the collection of the  Portland Museum of Art, The Farnsworth Art Museum, the Colby College Museum of Art and  CELINE. Her work has been featured in W Magazine, Wallpaper, and Art in America. Since  2017, Elizabeth Atterbury and artist Anna Hepler have collaborated on four Percent for Art  commissions across the state of Maine. Atterbury received her MFA from MassArt, Boston, MA  and her BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.

About the curator

Kate M. McNamara is a curator, educator, and author based in Providence, RI, with a deep commitment to collaboration, alternative art spaces, and fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue. She currently holds the interim role of John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director at the Carpenter Center at Harvard. She is also the founder of ODD-KIN, a contemporary art space in East Providence dedicated to experimental programming and artist-driven inquiry; and curator-at-large for the public art organization My HomeCourt. McNamara co-founded the Warhol funded regional Interlace Grant Fund, supporting artist-led initiatives, and serves as a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design and Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

Her previous roles include Interim Director at Providence College Galleries, and from 2015 to 2019, Director of Galleries and Exhibitions at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where she spearheaded dynamic exhibitions and programs with artists such as Kenzi Shiokava, Polly Apfelbaum, and Anna Craycroft. As Director and Chief Curator at the Boston University Art Galleries, she developed cross-disciplinary exhibitions and collaborations with artists like Leidy Churchman, Vlatka Horvat, and the collective Destroy All Monsters. In 2010 McNamara co-founded Cleopatra’s, a former Brooklyn-based alternative project space known for its artist-driven programming, and has held curatorial roles at MoMA PS1 and Participant, INC. She holds an MA from The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BA in Curatorial Studies from Hampshire College.

Support for this exhibition was provided by Mrs. in Queens, NY, DOCUMENT in Chicago, IL, and by CMCA’s Suzette McAvoy Exhibitions Fund.