Mary Hark • Untitled • 6' x 9' • Handmade papers, linen cloth, mixed media • Photographed by Jim Escalante
ORDINARY TOPOGRAPHIES
On View: January 21 - March 7, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 6-8pm. This event is free and open to all.
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TAC is pleased to present, ORDINARY TOPOGRAPHIES, a collection of recent works by artist, hand papermaker, and educator Mary Hark.
“Harks constructed paintings combine handmade papers and cloth into an intricate ground, stitched together with thread and built up into a complex stratigraphy with paint, wax, textile dyes, inks, and pencil marks. Large in scale, they appear both delicate and resilient. Their layered surfaces invoke the patina of time: the slow, subtle erosion of a well-thumbed page, the careless beauty of mended clothing, the evocative fissures in an old painted wall. Harks' dedicated study of both paper and textile techniques lends her surfaces a particular depth. She crosses traditional boundaries with knowledge and respect, creating a rich and surprising body of mixed-media work.”
-- Jody Clowes, curator, James Watrous Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin
Artist Statement
“Ordinary Topographies explores ideas informed by the remainders of daily life, evidence left behind in the environments where we live and work. Stains and marks suggest repeated gestures, labor, and the passage of time. The worn surfaces are at once known and comfortable while simultaneously considering messier, often overlooked remnants of our lived experience.
These works are constructed primarily from flax and linen papers, allowing me to explore the intrinsic properties available with handmade paper. Absorbed color and highly textured surfaces can carry ideas that are dark and earthy, as well as luminous, airy, and elegantly fragile. Heavily worked surfaces acknowledge the transformative potential of attention and labor. While individual works respond to ideas gleaned from specific experience, all this work makes use of the poetry found in the incidental marks we leave on the material worlds we occupy.”
About the Artist
Mary Hark is a Professor in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches papermaking and textiles. She is the proprietor of HARK! Handmade Paper producing limited editions of handmade papers in collaboration with book designers and artists, as well as unique paper artworks that have been exhibited internationally. Her work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, the Ginsberg Book Arts Collection in Johannesburg, South Africa, and in many university special collections in the United States. Hark is the recipient of a McKnight Fellowship in Book Arts for her work as a hand papermaker. In 2006 Hark received a Senior Fulbright Research Grant to Sub Saharan Africa, and continues to lead an initiative in Kumasi, Ghana, building the first hand papermill in West Africa capable of producing high-quality papers entirely from local botanicals. Hark earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.A. from the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Exhibitions at TAC are supported by Paula and David Kraemer, and by Dane Arts with additional funds from the Frautschi and Rowland Foundations, Diane Ballweg, and the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation.
If you are interested in information on supporting TAC’s nonprofit mission, and advancing creative expression through fiber art, please contact us.