....ARC : Maribeth COFFEY-SEARS

Maribeth Coffey-Sears, received her BFA from University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana in 1988, and her M.Ed. from National Louis University in 1997.  She is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Sculpture at Northern Il. University in DeKalb while also working as an art educator and exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. As an adoptee that has since reunited with her birth family, Maribeth brings personal issues of social economic and class divisions to light through her mixed media conceptual work. Her experience has led her to explore the transition of our intimate personal focus to an awareness of our broader affects on our surroundings and our surroundings on oneself. Although time moves us forward in our lives, we are grounded in our memories of experience that carry us forward.  

She creates by exploring artifacts of everyday life that people collect, possess, and use on a regular basis. These artifacts can take on a sacred meaning and represent cultural priorities and norms while expressing subtle tactile qualities of human history, making the objects take on a sense of the sacred, as though nostalgic sentiments emanate from them. She navigates through the unpredictable occurrences in the materials and allows the energies that exist within her instinct to form the finished works. Whether environmental or spiritual, her work relays a meeting point between nature and culture, religion and reality: a subjective universe.