Sculpture Magazine
Hilary Harnischfeger, Uffner & Liu
Written by Julian Stern
March 4, 2026
Hilary Harnischfeger has said that she thinks of her works more as drawings than anything else, but it requires an analogical leap to read her multimedia sculptures as drawings, defined as they are by jutting edges and protuberant growths which extend into space. Her freestanding pieces are especially rock-hard in their resistance to collapsing from three to two dimensions, from object to image. However, in “Songs for Clouds” (on view through March 7, 2026), Harnischfeger debuts three new wall-based works at the largest scale she’s produced yet, sedimenting the topo- and stratigraphical languages she’s been developing over the course of her career. In effect, superlative size coincides with superlative legibility.
She often begins her sculptures with preparatory drawings on paper. From there, the drawings get built up and worked out until they’re lost in composite bodies of ceramic, Hydrostone, paper, ink, quartz, mica, glass, and wood. In one of her more unique material treatments, she layers and then shaves dyed cardstock to produce densely striated surfaces. When she deposits a crystal into such a ground—as in the upper left corner of Harlequin II (2024)—the formation appears geological. Of course, no ancient drip slid through gaps in the material to accumulate and dry there, but the solids meet with exactly that kind of perfect liquid seal, as if they had hardened over eons. A work like Juniper (2026) is so imposing that one can stand before its roughly rectangular face and feel immersed in a candy-colored cave, or the ruins of a palace built of the strangest stones. The question arises: What kind of forces might have controlled the climate and environment to produce such a bizarre chapter of natural history?
Any immersive illusions, however, are dispelled by the straight edges and hard corners which limit the work. A relative planarity suddenly obtains throughout Juniper, like a landscape seen through an airplane window, or a topographical map hanging on the wall. The veins of seafoam green running through the surface are then unmistakably rivers, the patches of densely packed green cylinders so many trees. In Echo Canyon (2026), what might have appeared as the fossil of a flower embedded in a rock wall or a cross-section of cable running through the earth, now seems more like a cyclone swirling at a lower level of the atmosphere. Depending on whether the edges are in view, one’s impulse to read these forms in terms of the geologic record or cartographic tradition varies.
Attempting to decode Harnischfeger’s forms in these ways suggests that drawing is not limited to lines on paper; it is a means of organizing space and meting out time. If the lines that traverse her sculptures seem alternately to divide land and index durations, it is because she plays on the near-automatic impulse to read marks as meaningful, revealing how readily vision turns material difference into narrative and structure.
