The work of Marcie Miller Gross is centered around her response to place with a focus on spatial, conceptual and architectonic elements. Gross uses materials with which she has an “intimate visceral connection” to manipulate space and expound upon simple, geometric shapes. Her accumulative process of building up and breaking down industrial felt, sweaters, and towels yields objects and installations that embrace the dichotomy between industrial minimalism and human intimacy.
Gross began her creative practice in the field of design and architecture discovering a love for creative design toys, the Fröbel Gifts, as well as the historical lineage of handmade textiles. She saw a universal connection between cloth, felt and paper, as these are the earliest textiles ever made, and, similarly, a direct connection between the Fröbel Gifts and the modernist Bauhaus School, among other significant 20th century artists.
Working with mismatched bath towels and used hospital towels, Gross tenderly manipulated these textiles into weight bearing objects that evoke humanity, vulnerability, and shared history. The uniform stacks are loosely personified within an architectural context, some small and slumping like the curve of an aching back, some monumental and heavy like gravity pressing down on a skull. After years of endurance mining this material, Gross moved away from the domestic to the utilitarian. Industrial felt in tow, she began exploring the material for the undercurrent of humanity nestled in its fibers.
Beginning with basic, geometric mounds of felt adhered in layers, Gross used a bandsaw to bisect the mounds into stacks of varying proportions, toying with both the texture of the material and the relationship to light, rhythm, and space. Throughout these many studies Gross found that the tactile experience of the felt changed as she altered her means of deconstruction. Through this process of building and deconstructing, she found the material “blurring the boundary of animal and mineral,” and became infatuated with coaxing the mammalian qualities out of the industrial object. Her pieces Wedge and Cut & Sheared #2 use fine charcoal gray industrial felt that fluxes with its destruction and assemblage. Both pieces reflect a marriage of animal and industrial; the manipulated textures remind Gross of seal skin while the forms are akin to speaker boxes or rigid hardware.
Orange (split) is an experiment in pushing her wedge form beyond its geometric shape, and readdressing it as a single gesture. Beginning with stacks of vibrant orange felt adhered as one large rectangular piece, Gross split the form in two. The forms were reconfigured into a slanted incline, the top portion jutting away from the bottom in a slight manner: the petite displacement of the two objects results in a grand gesture that embraces the dichotomy of handmade and machine made, object and landscape, void and mass, animal and industrial. These explorations continue to propel her studio practice as she continues studying the “undulation, shadow and light, and differing sense of rhythm,” she can elicit from her materials.
– Halcombe Miller