Drawing on a meditative practice spanning decades, Ann Pachner’s work speaks to balance and vitality. Pachner has observed that woodworking and mindfulness share in their procedural and reflective qualities, she states, “While one moves toward form, the other moves to the formless.” The repeated action of chisel and mallet are the means by which the artist’s rhythmic impressions take shape, as Pachner explores the index of presence in matter and movement in form. The marks that remain from her carving are a reminder that consciousness is an infinite becoming.

Pachner’s abstract sculpture draws on ancient architecture, including the Sumerian frustum, as well as those aspects of the natural world, blossoms, water, fire, suggestive of both the material and immaterial. Pachner describes the plateau of Truncated Pyramid, 2003, as creating a liminal space between the seen and unseen. Her repeated motif of “quickening,” hints at the accumulation of life energy in a series of spherical forms skirted by low-amplitude waves. Pachner endows her sculpture with iconic significance, prompting the viewer to seek patterns which, in repetition become both soothing and anticipatory, as meaning comes, always, increasingly into focus. In Waves, 2002, the sculpture’s crenated contours and recurring lines create the illusion of motion in stillness, while organic shifts of color mark time in concentric patterns of vibrating line. Pachner’s 1995 pencil-drawing, Going Home, layers shades of grey and white that seem to cast off waves that she describes as a “river of energy flowing upwards.”

In her work of the 1970s, Pachner’s sculpture took on the familiar shapes of functional quotidian objects—chair, door, the outline of a miniature house. Ancestors, 1977, backs four pine chairs against a wall that is layered with paint and graphite, while Caught in One Self, 1977, inextricably entangles the frames of two chairs, the top rail of each sealed into the structure of the other. Ancestors suggests presence and absence in the space held for one’s forebearers, while One Self, frames a unity in which two conjoined chairs are symbolic of a single identity in conflict with itself.

In her later work, Pachner evokes the shared vitality imbued in all. Her bowl forms suggest the welling and holding of energy. The series Splitting/Two’s, 1985-1990, troubles the division of interior and exterior with elusive surfaces that, in a process of opening, flow seamlessly from concave to convex. In the continuum between interior and exterior, Pachner opens form to change and the possibility of dialogue with the other.

Pachner’s works, adopting the introspective qualities of her practice, function as objects of study, with shapes to which the mind can bend itself and surfaces that allow the viewer to realize the scope of their own attention. Entwining interior and exterior, discrete form and internal unity, Pachner’s sculpture allows for an alternative meditative practice—suggesting the longing for form to hold the fullness of experience.

Nicole Kaack

Associate Director A.I.R. Gallery

Independent Curator
2021