Review: Charming meditation on wood, craft in Atlanta artist’s show

Bottom line: A clever ode to wood and the shared preoccupations of art and craft.

Artist Martha Whittington has a thing for wood. As of late, she’s been making elaborate installations and sculptures from it, filling galleries and museums with strange worlds of her own invention, kingdoms of plywood and wood glue.

In "Used Air" at Whitespace Gallery, Whittington created an immersive show with wood contraptions as the centerpiece, built on the idea of coal mining. In "Deus Ex Machina" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, she created a vivid world out of plywood and fabric, manned by unseen workers engaged in monotonous labors like slaves in some dystopian future.

Whittington’s latest solo show, at Sandler Hudson Gallery, is, just in time for Valentine’s Day, a love letter to a favorite material — wood — that most malleable and shape-shifting of media, the stuff of writing paper and furniture, guns and ships.

“With the Grain: Works on Paper” is this Atlanta artist’s sly celebration of wood’s incredible variety. Her solo exhibition incorporates the ladylike paper craft of quilling, a pastime of the upper crust since the Renaissance, and the working folk’s labor of wood splitting and furniture making. Lumberjacks and Shakers would feel equally at home in this wood-grain tribute to all things hickory, poplar and mahogany. It’s a celebration of the common urge of artists and craftspeople to make something new from the materials at hand.

Whittington’s shows often give off a tangible sense of the artist’s delight in making things and pursuing an idea in a multiplicity of forms. One of this artist’s true gifts is a very human approach, a warmth and wit and accessibility in the things she makes that let you forget their more conceptual elements, and just enjoy them as smartly made objects with a creative mind and deft hand behind them.

With references to furniture making and craft, “With the Grain” features a selection of small sculptures, works on paper, as well as a few larger sculptures. Whittington’s work has often shown a low-key wit and sense of absurdity. Those characteristics are on winning display in the sculpture “MB315,” which features three abstracted branches carved from mahogany and leaning against a wall like loafers. The objects have a semblance of nature, but look more like neo-woody design courtesy of West Elm or Pottery Barn. These almost comical approximations of “branch” show the human propensity to bring nature indoors in the most circumscribed ways imaginable.

Craftsmanship is at the heart of other works too, like the small framed sculptural pieces in wood and paper that show a wedge splitting a log. Graphic and simple, these humorous illustrations of the task at hand suggest a textbook instructional on wood splitting. The way Whittington conveys “log” in the image is hilariously minimalist: with a simple knot hole.

“With the Grain” isn’t necessarily Whittington’s most spectacular moment as an artist, but more a suitably restrained, meditative digression fitted to the confines of a small gallery space. The heroic scale, compelling storytelling and theatrical impact of some of her most memorable shows at Whitespace or MOCA GA will certainly stand as far more memorable triumphs. But there is a lovely simplicity and elegance to the work in “With the Grain,” much like a finely crafted Shaker table.