These striking white-on-white wall sculptures by Marion Tippetts were on display at Tippetts/Weaver Architects, 137 N. Duke St., along with black-and-white photographs by Toby Richards in a show called “Interplay of Light and Shadow, Line and Form” during the Spring ArtWalk.
Tippetts, a graduate of Penn and the Rhode Island School of design, worked for many years in the Boston area and now lives in Amelia Island, Fla. Inspired by nature and the ever-changing yet constant presence of the ocean, Tippetts, the daughter of architect Wendy Tippetts, works within simple geometric forms to create elegant constructions. “Simplification is the essence of my work,” Tippetts says in her artists’ statement, but the works are more than simple forms hanging in space. The deep edges, bisecting channels, cutouts and inserts of the constructions create shadows, and “the shadows do it all,” as Tippetts said at the exhibit Saturday.
Richards also drew inspiration from nature and water; specifically, rock formations along the Susquehanna near Bainbridge, ground down by the action of the water and exposed during dry periods. These compelling photographs are also elegant, even stark explorations of positive and negative space. In their near-abstraction, phantom landscapes and other images sometimes seem to emerge from the lines and shapes of the rocks. Other images, such as that of an egg-shaped stone resting in the hollow it has weathered out for itself in a larger rock, are simply, wonderfully themselves. (I was unable to include an image from the exhibit, but check Richards’ Web site for an example of his work.) Richards, a commercial photographer, is originally from New Jersey and has lived in Lancaster for the past five years.
