Photography by Stephen White

If Mother Nature is the master designer, then Tara Donovan must be her direct descendant. Allowing her materials to lead the way, Donovan stacks, piles, heaps, and mounds as they see fit, letting the natural laws of chance and gravity rule her process. Each material’s own limitations and natural abilities rule the outcome of her sculptures — works composed of synthetic, man-made materials that resemble nature at its most ethereal.
     For instance, in Haze, she stacks millions of clear drinking straws against the full length of a gallery wall in what resembles a hazy blur or rolling fog bank. Nebulous, a twenty-foot installation formed from thousands of looped rounds of Scotch tape, appears like a soft mist emerging from the museum floor. Transplanted, composed of ripped and stacked tar paper, evokes the smooth, arid landscapes of the American Southwest.
     The simple repetition of her work makes sense the way nature makes sense. In fact Donovan, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow, is continually amazed by the places tar paper, buttons, plastic cups, and Scotch tape have taken her. “I’m completely relying on the physical properties of the material before me going where it naturally, inherently wants me to go,” she explains in an interview with Lawrence Wechsler in the volume Tara Donovan, “so things always wind up mimicking nature in a way.”