SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery is presenting Of Water, Dust, and Light, an exhibition of new work by Danae Mattes.
Mattes’ career is a dynamic, ever-evolving relationship with water and clay. For over three decades, she has sculpted, poured, and painted with the earth in its raw form. In her studio, she weaves clay’s minerals and water into an intimate language between land and the human hand. This confluence now manifests as a mature vocabulary shaped by repeated interaction with the earth itself. Interaction ripples into evolution. What emerges is not only a visual field but a record of deep listening: to earth’s histories, to the exquisite circumstance of water circulating throughout the biosphere, and to the restless threshold between form and flux.
Her process begins with clay poured directly onto the canvas to establish an elemental ground. This foundational layer operates as both medium and metaphor—an invocation of geologic time and material memory. Minerals such as mica introduce luminosity, inviting light to engage with the surface. As water evaporates from the clay form into the atmosphere, the remaining clay undergoes a transformation integral to the water cycle, shaped and structured by this leave-taking against the force of gravity.
Since the evolution of her Evaporation Pools into clay-based paintings—in her words, wall objects—Mattes has continually pushed the boundaries of her medium. In her collaboration with Hope Mohr, dancers merge with clay and water, their bodies moving within and marked by the earth. Here, the border between human and landform blurs. The resulting choreographed topography, together with Mattes’ recent experimentation with powdered clay, gave rise to the painting Opening—the genesis of the series Of Earth and Stars and this show—now held in the collection of the de Young Museum.
“I enjoy creating multiple layers —setting an intention, then welcoming what emerges,” says Mattes. Her studio is a sunlit sanctuary covered in all corners by canvases and tubs of mineral, scented with the ancient breath of the earth. “It is a constant navigation between attachment and letting go.” By propping the canvas at various angles and pouring successive layers of earthen material, the artist both responds to and directs the movement of the clay as it settles, allowing gravity, time, material, and water to inscribe their own marks. The resulting works coalesce from this ongoing dialogue between control and surrender, evoking landscapes shaped as much by human gesture as by elemental force.
Water is the enduring thread in Mattes’ work, molding both material and meaning. Her compositions unfold as landforms, but also as sensory records—traces of evaporation, sediment, and atmospheric shift. A sense of altitude permeates each piece: cloud forms drift, condensation filters through the canvas, and the horizon hovers in suggestion. In Rising III, silver and gold-white tones ebb across the surface, while warm kaolin clay captures the fleeting glow of sunlit sea foam. Clay is manipulated at different viscosities, creating dimensional striations that micro-parallel geologic layers or ocean depths. Blue-black settles into abyss, while clay dust—the newest element in her palette—hovers like mist over a dynamic stillness now characteristic of her work. Mattes’ meditation on gravity, air, and water gives rise to translucence and depth—suddenly, we are peering through light and shadow into what Mattes calls ‘an exquisite circumstance.’.
While grounded in the terrestrial, Of Water, Dust, and Light also evokes the fleeting qualities we come to associate with the celestial. The clay cracks and etches pathways across the canvas as desert heat would across a dry lakebed. The silver luster of mica, bluish-gray talc, and kaolinite dust call upon astral clusters spread across the gradient of a nebula. In Of Water, Dust, and Light, VI, creamy white strikes from above, like starlight settling into clay. The gold-white arch in Vault transforms into the mouth of a cave as one steps in front of the canvas, now staring out into a mist-heavy night.
In Mattes’ practice, material is never passive—it is collaborator, witness, and storyteller. The clay holds memory: of water, pressure, heat, time. Each pour, each shift of the canvas echoes the fragile balance we navigate in our relationship with the natural world. Through her layering of mineral and earth, Mattes invites the viewer into a slowed temporality, one attuned to erosion, drift, and accumulation. In this space of quiet transformation, the work becomes a site of reflection—on presence, on care, and on the subtle, ongoing dialogue between human touch and elemental force.
Danae Mattes was born in 1958 in Rochester, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA from Edinboro State University in Pennsylvania in 1980 followed by her MFA from Long Beach State University in 1984. Mattes’ work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, most recently “Where the River Widens” at the BYU Museum of Art and “Transitory Waterscapes” at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, as well as the collaboration “Lightfast: Intertwine” at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. She has been commissioned to create public artworks both nationally and internationally, and worked extensively on collaborative projects with Hope Mohr Dance. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum; the Crocker Art Museum; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art; and Museum Schloss Landeck.
