Tara Thacker Opens Linnea at Gravers Lane Gallery With Ceramic, Metal and Collagraph Prints

Tara Thacker builds ceramic walls out of thousands of small parts, and in Linnea she turns the same patience toward line. The exhibition opens at Gravers Lane Gallery on November 23 and runs through January 10, 2027, with ceramic, metal and collagraph prints all organized around one idea. A line implies motion, and Thacker wants a viewer to follow it.

Tara Thacker and the Thousand Parts

Thacker is a ceramicist who makes sculptures and large wall pieces from individual components, thousands of them in a single work. Each part is unique. Each one serves as an architectural unit, and she combines them in different ways to find out how they behave together. It is slow, labor-intensive work, and the result is a surface no single piece could produce alone.

Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1970, she studied ceramics and sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she earned her BFA in 1992, and took her MFA in ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1995. The work of Tara Thacker emphasizes fluidity and softness, which is an odd thing to ask of fired clay and is exactly the point.

Tara Thacker and the Material Question

Clay is her usual choice because of its tactile beauty, its malleability and the technical trouble it causes. She wants works that do not immediately read as ceramic. They often look soft, downy or fabric-like, with none of the rigidity people expect from something that has been through a kiln.

That is the argument running through her practice. Repetition is how she gets there. One small form is plainly clay, but forms layered in large numbers start to read as feather or textile, and the material stops announcing itself. Her stated aim is to move past the starting form and arrive at surfaces she did not plan, drawing a line between observation and memory.

Tara Thacker and the Avian World

Birds supply the forms. Her current work references bird wing structures, the Remiges and Retrices, and nesting habitats in the Horizon Series, and both rely on repeated, overlapping elements. Thacker is also concerned about the decline in bird populations, which she ties to intensive agriculture and a warming planet.

She presents the work as a place for observation and reflection, and for hope about preserving habitat for all species. Gravers Lane has made room for nature-driven work before, including Ron Isaacs’s trompe l’oeil birch reliefs earlier this year and the 2025 exhibition Echoes in Thread.

Tara Thacker in Linnea at Gravers Lane Gallery

Linnea is the newest installation at the gallery, and it treats line as a design element, a tool and a component to multiply and layer. The path through it is ambiguous, and the viewer decides which direction, or which memory, to take next.

Tara Thacker works in ceramic, metal and collagraph prints here, so the same idea moves between sculpture and the printed surface. Line and repetition are meant to carry each form past where it began, and a viewer who stays with one piece long enough should start to see the system behind it.

Gravers Lane Gallery has focused on contemporary craft since 2011, with Bruce Hoffman as curator. Its program spans ceramics, fiber, glass, wood, metals and painting, with a particular strength in fine art jewelry.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment. The First Friday reception is December 4 from 5 to 8 p.m., and Tara Thacker gives the artist talk at 6:30, which puts the maker in the room with the work she has spent decades refining.

Thacker has spent her career making soft things from hard material, and Linnea extends that argument to line itself, one repeated mark at a time.