Artist statement

My work excavates the emotional residue of objects—what’s inherited, imposed, or internalized. I move between paintings and mixed media sculptures, using my art as a way to process what language can’t always be trusted to communicate.

I can’t visualize forms.
So instead, I build.

Aphantasia leaves me without an inner image, so my process begins with a combination of touch and emotion. Plastic, glass, wire, clay—materials that insist on their own resistance. I follow what feels right until it becomes wrong, then stay there. I rescue discarded relics and give them agency, allowing them to misbehave, to refuse their original purpose.

I’m drawn to the tension between beauty and discomfort:
fragile materials calcified into strength,
the transparent rendered opaque,
containment giving way to rupture,
soft shapes hardening.

Each work of art becomes an act of reconfiguration—of boundaries, of bodies, of usefulness itself. My process is a form of meditation, sitting with forms until they speak to me. It often begins when wandering around a Northern Marin trail, an estate sale or an antique store, when a subject or object catches my attention and I just can’t seem to put it down.

I make work to metabolize the world around me,
to attempt to understand that which resists understanding.

I believe there’s beauty in the things we usually ignore:
the mundane, the castoffs, that which quietly endures at the sidelines.

My work asks you to look twice at what you might have otherwise dismissed,
to find presence in what once felt merely peripheral.

I see the theory of containment to be both a comfort and a lie.
I build vessels that leak, surfaces that refuse neat definition, relics that rewrite their own complicated histories.

Just when you think you recognize what you’re looking at—
it morphs before your very eyes. ◼️

Artist bio

Mara Lantz is a multidisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work moves between painting, sculpture, and mixed media, often using physical objects or nature as stand-ins to explore psychological concepts, family dynamics, and social constructs. Mara loves nothing more then searching for forgotten relics in thrift stores and estate sales, then “rescuing” them—bestowing these once-discarded items with newfound agency and purpose. Aphantasia shapes her process: unable to conjure mental images voluntarily, she constructs through touch, intuition, and emotional resonance. As a professional writer by trade, she’s particularly interested in how language—titles, captions, and statements—contain the power to completely transform a viewer’s experience of a piece of art.