ARTIST STATEMENTI am a lifelong collector. Not of things for their own sake, but of objects that carry time inside them — a rusted hinge, an abandoned tool, a piece of metal worn smooth by decades of use. These are the materials I work with. They arrive in my studio already changed by the world, and it is my task to change them again.
My practice is rooted in assemblage, construction and welding — methods that are, at their core, about transformation. I disassemble found objects and reassemble them into forms that could not have existed before. In doing so, I am not simply making sculpture. I am making argument: that the discarded is not finished, that objects carry memory the way people do, and that beauty can be wrested from what the world has let go.
What interests me most is the moment when a material stops being itself and becomes something else — when a piece of cast metal begins to read as grief, or joy, or the texture of a particular afternoon from forty years ago.
I work across metal, wood, clay and found objects, often combining them in ways that collapse past and present. The histories embedded in these materials are not erased when I use them; they are layered, distorted, and ultimately woven into something new.
My large-scale outdoor work extends this inquiry into public space. When a sculpture lives outside — in a park, on a street, in a field — it enters into a different kind of conversation. It weathers. It draws strangers. It asks to be encountered rather than observed. I am drawn to this vulnerability, and to the possibility that a piece of salvaged material, transformed and placed in the open air, might stop someone mid-step and make them remember something they did not know they had forgotten.
I have spent decades teaching alongside making — and I believe these are not separate things. To teach someone to look closely at an object, to understand its structure and its possibilities, is to teach them to look closely at the world.
The studio and the classroom have always been the same space for me: a place where materials and people are both capable of becoming more than what they were.
– Mary Pat Wager, 2026
Mary Pat in her Upstate New York Studio
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