A network runs through Brenda Mallory’s sculptures in her installation The North Star Changes, a retrospective of her work organized by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and showing at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem through March 22. Mallory is a Cherokee Nation artist who is from Oklahoma but has made Portland her home for the last 30 years. She is a found-objects sculptor, and there is little doubt when viewing her pieces that texture is holy.

Mallory references Marcel Duchamp, found-object sculptor, when speaking about her work. It is partly because of his groundbreaking work that her own art thrives. 

It was his goal, Duchamp said, “to put art back in service of the mind.” He was successful in doing this, according to painter Jasper Johns, who said that Duchamp’s work is “the field where language, thought and vision act on one another.”

Mallory’s work, much like Duchamp’s, demands that the viewer examine her work and its complexities, and look deeply for its meaning.

While Duchamp liked to subvert expectations, Mallory has taken a different, more concrete approach to stimulating her viewers’ minds. She asks you to look at the world as possibilities and at its potential while simultaneously recognizing the flaws of the past and the present and how nature and humanity always find surprising new ways to survive.

Like a thread from one of her fiber pieces, there is a cohesion and continuity of ideas that runs through her pieces, even though they come from different series. Individually, each piece acts as a magnet drawing the viewer into the mystery seeking understanding.

This is intentional.

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“I always feel like I’ve most succeeded at a work if there are multiple interpretations that can be made,” she said.

“Maybe when I’m starting the piece, I have an intentional feeling or a specific thing I’m thinking about, and I hope that comes across to you, but I hope that’s not all that comes across to you. I hope your own experiences are going to bring more to it, and you’ll get something out of it that maybe I didn’t.”

Mallory uses nature and biology as a template to express her ideas. Here can be found cell structures, geometric sequences like the hexagonal cell structure of the honeycomb. Concepts like growth, fertility, reclamation, and time weave in and out of each piece.

“I love reading about biology,” she said. “I read the captions on the pictures, and that’s often about as deep as I understand it. I’ve always been interested in biology and nature and these systems at work.  

“A lot of my pieces are based on the natural world and biological growth forms. In nature there are patterns that develop as something is growing and proliferating that might seem totally chaotic and random, but there’s often an organized system or process developing.

“In the last couple years I’ve read some books on quantum time. It’s not at all the linear time we experience. Several of my pieces over the years have been about time and shared days. The piece Making Time in this show is specifically about my mother’s death and her days on the planet.”

Looking at Mallory’s art, it becomes apparent that she likes structure and logical systems, even if the product appears to be random and erratic to the human eye.

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“In mathematics there is a ratio called ‘the golden mean,’” she said. “It can be found in many growth patterns in nature. I often use that ratio for some of my pieces. Truly, they could go on forever, but at some point I’ll decide the size of one side, and determine the final size by using the golden mean.”  

Before coming to art, Mallory studied linguistics, the study of the structure and morphology of language. The idea that all things must adhere to a pattern has followed her into art.

“I don’t know if I would say (linguistics) applies to my process,” she said. “Maybe it applies to this part of myself that wants to understand what system is at work in a situation, and linguistics is about how languages work, and what structural mechanisms are at work in a language.

“So that part, wondering how the system works, I would say, is something that interests me and that has applied throughout my art career.”

The use of structure — that of nature and time — provides a framework of the intention behind each sculpture. A piece may be a commentary on the use of pesticides and genetic engineering in plants and the impact these have on the world, or how it could reflect on how humanity has made use of nature for its own gain; whether this is good or bad is left to the viewer.

But alongside these messages stands a personal one as well. There is a consideration of self and a reflection of Mallory in that moment. Her time is expressed and analyzed in its natural cycle. The lunar calendar is often a featured motif, with several pieces illustrating its thirteen months and 28 days.

Her sculpture Demeter Does the Math (and Cries) is a perfect example of how Mallory approaches all of her work. Though it is one of her first pieces, it is a microcosm of her ideas then and now, and illustrates Duchamp’s influence.

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Using the sculpture’s components, which are made from cotton, bullet casings and beeswax, she explores the idea of generational fertility and its cessation in nature and balance. These thoughts overlay her use of the lunar calendar, an explicit nod to a woman’s monthly cycle. The piece is the movement of time captured and encapsulated and expressed in these reclaimed objects like a fly suspended in amber, like an egg waiting for the womb.

“I was thinking in 2000, when the sculpture was created, of Monsanto and the Terminator seed technology that engineered infertility into seed crops, agricultural seed crops. I was thinking a lot about that, and fertility,” Mallory said of Demeter Does the Math (and Cries).

“I think of these as spent seeds. Did anything come out of them that grew on, or is it just a void of emptiness?”

On her website Mallory mentions that this reflection was also influenced by her thoughts of her own life cycle as she entered midlife, and that of her young daughter, who was just entering puberty.

Mallory’s use of recycled and reclaimed material often underscores the statement she is making with her sculpture. In this case, sanitary napkins illustrate the lost potential, and nature’s need to self-replicate.

“They’re made out of the offcuts from cotton menstrual pads,” she said. “I used to own the business Glad Rags, so I had stacks and stacks of these offcuts that were basically destined for the dump, and I didn’t want that to happen.”

The piece also includes another family connection that can be traced back to her childhood.

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“Beeswax is also a material that figures into so much of my work, even to this day,” she said of the stiffening agent she used to form the cotton pad castoffs. “My grandfather, back in Oklahoma, was a beekeeper.”

This one piece illustrates the depth and care she takes with all her work. She is clearly signaling her vision, and at the same time creating levels within levels.

“I think there is a network of ideas going on in this show, which is kind of retrospective in nature, because there are some of my very earliest pieces that I made that I feel like are still valid, and I’m still exploring ideas around them,” she said.

“They’re a spreading network of ideas that are all connected, and they might not always be spreading and growing. They might be folding right in on them, connected to the same thought.”  

Brenda Mallory, Crossings (left) and Relic (right).

Alongside biology and time, the thread that binds her work together weaves through family, and that includes her native culture, which she has spent years learning about.

“Those ideas are very much in my thoughts when I make pieces about Cherokee history,” Mallory said. “And it is not just the Cherokees, but these ideas apply to other Native tribes in this country, who’ve had their whole culture, world view, land, everything taken and disrupted, but still here we are functioning along.

“The Cherokees were herded, sometimes at gunpoint, out of their homelands, where they’d been for years, to Oklahoma, where they had to make, and this is a term I often use in my work, make do with new places, new plants. They were uprooted and forcibly assimilated. To me, it’s amazing we still have any cultural traditions left.

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“Sometimes I am overtly thinking of that history,  and other times I think ideas filter through me in an unconscious way, below the surface of awareness.”

Much of what we learned as children we learned through osmosis. We gain information watching our family and the community around us. Creativity and art are often tied to this sponge-like learning. We reach for a tool to create something, and we grab the tool that we are most familiar with; often that’s because it’s the tool we saw our parents working with.

“I used to use a lot of wire,” Mallory said. “My dad held half the stuff on our farm together with baling wire because he didn’t have the money to go buy the tools and weld the thing. That idea of just making do with what you have is a form of survival, both in a real way, but in this other metaphorical way of trying to survive and keep a culture alive through different ways.

“I work a lot with the idea of something that’s broken and repaired or broken, and then taking off in a different path. I had always been a worker with my hands … I come from a family of makers who were always doing something with their hands, so that feels very natural to me.”

These influences, memories, training and interests manifest themselves boldly in her work. Like a net, she pulls them along from piece to piece.

The sculptures in The North Star Changes range in size and style. One piece takes up more than half of the room it is displayed in, while others hang along the gallery wall, taking up no more space than a large poster.

The show’s installation has a powerful impact on the viewer, as do the sculptures themselves. The effect is very akin to looking into a microscope. Gazing long into the details creates a sense of something greater than oneself, and impresses on the viewer the universe in its many manifestations. It creates a heady sensation as one gets lost following the visual patterns and is challenged by the thought-provoking content.

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“The title of the show, The North Star Changes, is the idea that we want there to be something we can firmly grasp onto and believe,” Mallory said, “and maybe we can for a while, but we’re such small potatoes that we don’t know a bigger thing’s going on around us.

“There are a lot of ways to read information into that title and that thought too, which I’m not even sure I clearly understand myself all that I’m thinking about with it.”

The thread that has woven all of these ideas together has been one of communication: how time, family, culture, and nature communicate thought, intention, and action. Without communication we are alone.

“I’ve had all the titles translated into the Cherokee syllabary, because many people don’t know what it is and why it’s important,” Mallory said. “There was one person, Sequoyah, who basically invented a written form of the language, because he saw how important it was for communication in response to colonizers coming and seeing how easily they could communicate across distance.”

Viewing Mallory’s installation allows us to communicate across the great distance that lies between one person and another.

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Brenda Mallory: The North Star Changes

• Where: Hallie Ford Museum of Art, 700 State St., Salem
• When: Through March 22
• Museum hours: Noon-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays
• Admission: $8 general; $5 ages 55+; free for ages up to 17, museum members, educators and students 18+ with I.D., Willamette University and Pacific Northwest College of Art students, faculty and staff

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