SF/Arts Curator Insight

Artist Danae Mattes works with the Earth. Sculpting clay onto canvas while experimenting with raw pigments and oxides, she creates paintings that look like land formations captured from space. When discussing her work, Mattes references the German prefix "ur," which means primal, primeval, or very. Ur plus "alt" (old) = "uralt" (ancient). Interestingly, Ur was also an important site in Mesapotamia, a city located near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, but the coastline has since shifted, so what was once on the water is now well inland. Mattes' compositions resemble vast waterways that are slowly drying up, illustrating our current transition from the world we once knew to the one we will soon live in.