Mai Wierenga

Project Statement

The Ephemeral Altar project began one day when, while working in the studio on other things, I noticed that a small collection of reclaimed metal and wood scraps I'd gathered over time had been unconsciously arranged into a poignant and personally relevant assemblage. I recognized the composition as an altar representing a moment in my life, a memory that had become repressed and needed to be processed in order to be released. This epiphany of recognition led me to develop the concept of using art-objects as emotional processing tools into a series of dynamic, interactive sculpture sets.

About Mai Wierenga

In my creative practice I produce ‘contemplative objects’. This means embracing formal ambiguity through open-ended abstraction by curating dynamic forms into combinations of colors and shapes that, while evocative, do not point to anything else in particular. By resisting clear figuration and linear narrative, these contemplative objects create a temporal point of activation where the viewer becomes an active participant in the process of meaning-making. Each object becomes an invitation for the audience to co-create the work by bringing their own associations and emotions to it, while taking away from the experience whatever was needed by them at the time of their contemplation. This opens each piece of work to a multitude of interpretations, every one of which I believe to be equally and inherently correct: contemplative objects do not themselves hold meaning, but rather hold space for the formation of meaning.

MFA in Applied Craft + Design