The first monograph on artist Roberta B. Marks explores her collages and constructions, which focus on the themes of memory, time, and transcendence through a feminist and Buddhist perspective.
Marks creates constructions that have an intimacy to them and at the same time contain entire worlds of feeling and memory. Each is a vignette—a narrative of a personal nature. She transforms a range of objects and materials, often of mundane and humble origin, into eloquent and highly personal forms of self-
expression. Marks's work speaks to the human impulse to collect, preserve, and immortalize.
Her pieces are intuitive and instinctual, exuding a sense of mystery. The viewer enters into an intensely private realm, yet the themes are universal—loss, longing, old age, death, repression, and liberation—thus evoking a feeling of familiarity. A practicing Buddhist, Marks achieves her clarity through daily meditation. She has written "when constructing a work, I pare it down to the essence—the minimal. Each chosen object represents years of seeing with acute awareness." Marks's writings accompany a selection of approximately 200 of her most evocative works.
