Véronique Plesch and David L. Simon – Harriett Matthews: A Life Mapping Place

To consider the legacy of Harriett Matthews is to chart a life defined by an enduring fascination with place, physical movement through diverse topographies, deep spatial observation, and a career spent engaging with space, form, and environment. Whether navigating the terrain of Maine, the ancient geography of Greece, or the varied landscapes of her international travels, Harriett did not merely observe a location in her penetrating manner—she mapped it. Through precise spatial relationships and topographic and architectural references, her sculptures and drawings serve as structural markers of human experience.

Born in Kansas City, Harriett received her BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Georgia, where she studied with sculptor Leonard DeLonga. After a one-year sabbatical replacement position at the University of Oklahoma, she moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, to work in the university’s music library. In 1966, she joined the faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she virtually founded, developed, and spearheaded the sculpture program. Colby enabled her first trip to Europe, fulfilling an inspiration sparked by her coursework with Byzantine art historian Ljubica Popovich at Georgia. That initial trip catalyzed decades of exploration—from studying Māori carvings in New Zealand and Maya sites in the Yucatán to Etruscan art in Italy. Athens, Greece, in particular, became a lifelong touchstone to which she returned for countless summers while exploring surrounding historical sites.

On her own website, Matthews explained that “travel to photograph specific sites or to draw from landscape became the visual source” for her work in sculpture. “The idea, whether taken from a monastery, an archaeological site, or a landscape, affords the format for formal exploration.” This became “a never-ending source for exploring scale relationships between parts, the spatial interaction of the parts in space, and the implied weight in relation to the balance between the sections in the pieces.”

Her early travels established her willingness to seek out sites far removed from those artistic centers that were, and are, the realms of less unconstrained travelers; she included Bulgaria and Albania on her itineraries, countries whose geopolitical situations made them nearly inaccessible for an American during the period when they were part of the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc. Sometimes it was difficult to assess whether her guiding force was fearlessness or stubbornness, but whatever directed her, she followed her instincts with determination and independence. In many of the locations she visited, she stood out as a lone female voyager, and she was surprised and amused that her grit was noted by many of the locals she met. She had an amazing ability to find herself in precarious situations, given her proclivity to travel off the beaten path, and an equal facility for finding people to assist her. Her stories of being saved from uncomfortable situations were often hilarious, even when they were at once terrifying. But Harriett plowed through undaunted—a feat particularly noteworthy since, by her own reckoning, dealing with foreign languages was always a struggle for her. Her sense of place was always tied to her sense of the people she met on her journeys.

Across decades of artistic practice, she was indeed mapping—plotting geography, memory, and spatial relationships, excavating the history of how human beings relate to place. Take, for example, the meticulous drawings she created from her rooftop terrace in Athens, in which she delineated and charted the city’s complex urban topography. Many of her landscape drawings rely on a kind of aerial perspective, yet far from floating, the elements remain rooted in an endless, eternal natural world that is at once transitory. Throughout her work, her subjects are always placed on solid footings. Likewise, her sculptural works were deeply rooted in a sense of place and direct topographic references.

Consider the bronze that graces the staircase in Colby College’s Miller Library, which depicts clouds hovering over mountains—an impressive technical feat, capturing the ethereal lightness of clouds within heavy metal! Countless other sculptures draw upon Greek temples—structures inherently sited in environments resonant with meaning, which the architecture simultaneously sanctifies.

Her most recent works executed in Greece took the form of reliefs, individual elements combined to form a larger whole. In part, this reflected a working method where she was able to use the lost-wax process on a scale possible to achieve in the small space of her city apartment. The individual works allowed her to juxtapose places and points of view, enlivening the viewer’s experience of the sculpture by recording multiple places, contexts, angles, and vistas.

Another compelling segment of her oeuvre involves her series of roadside shrines: vernacular markers, both spiritual and physical, set across the landscape. These works chart space as enduring records of human presence and movement, devotion and pilgrimage. These shrines reflect human activity on and in the landscape—often serving as actual memorial markers, for example, commemorating sites of accidental deaths, that are at the same time profoundly life-affirming.

From the carefully plotted vistas of her Athens terrace to the sacred forms of her roadside shrines, her body of work offers us a rich cartography of form, memory, and landscape. And indeed, some of her drawings and a number of her sculptures relate not only to her travels, but to her own experience living in Maine. When she bought a house and property in the Maine countryside, her work began to feature organic elements. As she started a garden filled with herbs and other plants, she produced steel sculptures inhabited by vegetal and foliate forms, transforming the hard material of steel into seeming suppleness. Thus began one of the characteristics that defined many of her steel sculptures: achieving the incredible feat of fashioning forms from that hard material as soft as leaves or clouds, making them grow or float, even as they remain forever rooted in the artistic scape of her creation.