Michele Oka Doner: Feasting On Bark is open at Marlborough Gallery until May 16, 2015.

An internationally acclaimed artist whose prolific career spans four decades, Michele Oka Doner is inspired by a lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world from which she derives her formal vocabulary. The exhibition includes life-sized bronze and wax figures, blown glass balls in varying sizes that are hand-etched with the forms of pollen seeds or distant planets, anthropomorphic terracotta figures, bronze bees—as Gregory Volk has written in the catalogue essay, “…sculptures that resemble plants, plants that resemble sculptures, rock shards that look human, bronze or wax forms that that look to be growing, fossils that look magical, and bodies that look vegetal…” This body of work is influenced by the artist’s knowledge of botany and entomology. Prominently featured among these works is Hominin Relic, a fossil-like, monumental figure made of tree bark and wax hanging from a scaffold; a work that appears at once animated and fossilized.