Marita Dingus in her garden, image via Francine Seders Gallery

Marita Dingus is open-minded about what constitutes her material. Basically, it's whatever she lays her hands on and includes zippers, strips of cloth, light-bulb sockets, paper clips, tooth guards, paint brushes, bits of wire, computer innards, bent silverware, pacifiers, colored tape, paint, plastic, coarse thread and Pilchuck glass.

Her cloth collage babies have photographed faces behind plastic. All African-American, they stare at viewers with a Zen-baby grace. Sometimes her work has a burrowing mole feeling, as if she's digging ever deeper into the earth.

Made at Pilchuck under her direction, her flat, transparent glass heads give her burrowing intensity a point of light, a contrast that functions as an intensifier. She paints features on them and embeds in each aspects of a different personality.

The hair of one is made from light-bulb bases. Another's jewelry is pop-top tabs, wire twists, bits of fabric. The bodies crisscrossed with pieces of fabric and wire arc and sway against the wall, battered into being.

Dingus uses discards as metaphors for her people, those of African descent who were used as slaves and discarded. In her sculptures, those discards are born again into a powerful new life.

Images here.