Dharma Strasser MacColl

Traver Gallery is pleased to introduce new gallery artist Dharma Strasser MacColl with her debut exhibition, Intersection.

With this exhibition, Strasser MacColl deepens her exploration of abstraction, shifting further from the decorative and expanding into larger-scale work. Known for her precision and layered approach, she constructs compositions using hand-dyed porcelain, sewn paper, thread, and pigment, materials she deliberately weaves together to form tactile wall-works and sculptural installations.

Her work begins with a simple observation, a walking path, a piece of frayed rope faded in the sun, and evolves through slow, rhythmic accumulation. This process resists fast production, favoring a Luddite pace that embraces human imperfection, fingerprints in porcelain, irregular stitches, and broken and reattached elements. Each piece is built gradually, forming a quiet system of parts that reference both natural structures and the intimacy of human touch.

Themes of connection, community, and the search for meaning through patterns run throughout the work. Porcelain is hand-dyed to mimic a painter’s palette; paper is cut, pieced, and sewn like fabric, dot patterns accumulate into sculptural relief. These methods subtly subvert expectations of the grid and gesture toward the spiderweb or chain, structures that are functional, resilient, and inherently relational. Each porcelain link or stitched seam depends on the next, creating networks of form that echo both fragility and strength.

Strasser MacColl’s compositions hover between drawing, painting, and sculpture, inviting close attention. They ask us to consider the systems we build, the repetition we rely on, and how accumulated details, flawed, repaired, interconnected, shape how we see and understand the world.