Mari Andrews

Mari Andrews is a Bay Area artist whose sculpture, drawings, and prints are rooted in the intuitive and the elemental. Her practice rests on a logic of correspondence: the ancient idea, captured in the hermetic axiom "as above, so below," that the vastness of the universe is legible in the smallest of its parts. In Andrews' work, the small does not merely resemble the large but contains it, so that a single form can be at once a model, an echo, a container, and an entire world.

Andrews calls her sculptures "three-dimensional drawings." She builds them from seeds, leaves, moss, stones, metal wire, lead sheets, gampi paper, and mica, many of them gathered over four decades of walks through the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sierras. The act of collecting is itself part of the work: a way of reading the landscape closely, and of mapping the world in miniature. In these handfuls of materials, Andrews finds the broader natural orders from which those elements come. A seed carries within it the logic of a forest; a stone holds the memory of being shaped by a river. Andrews’ sculptures honor this compression, presenting small forms that function as models, intimate in scale and expansive in implication. In her hands, they become both objects and propositions.
 
Alongside these organic materials, Andrews incorporates the visual language, and at times the physical presence, of tools and instruments of measurement: compasses, gauges, rulers, and devices for reckoning time, distance, and direction. These are our human attempts to orient ourselves within systems far larger than we can fully perceive: to locate the self within space, within time, within nature. Set against mica and moss and wire, her work speaks to the same central impulse in her practice: the desire to find correspondence between what is immediate and what is vast, and to hold the macro within the micro. A small gesture, Andrews suggests, can reflect a larger pattern; the act of arranging a few gathered objects is not so different, in kind, from the forces that shape a hillside, or a constellation. In Andrews’ hands, the small and the vast are always, quietly, in conversation.
 
Andrews has traced these concerns across time. The oil stick drawings from the 1990s offer a window into the deep roots of Andrews’ visual thinking, evidence that her pared-down sensibility and her attunement to material, line, and space have long been central to her practice. In these works, looping forms, layered gestures, and translucent surfaces suggest structures that are both fixed and in flux, mapping space while resisting stable orientation. Set alongside her more recent sculpture and prints, they illuminate a sustained inquiry into what is essential, and what the essential has to say.
 
Andrews’ practice consistently invites the viewer to slow down and look more closely. In encountering one of her works, one finds something self-contained and whole, a world with its own gravity, coherence, and internal logic. There is a particular pleasure of recognition: the feeling of encountering something familiar made newly strange, or something strange made suddenly legible. The elemental forms Andrews works with can be so basic as to seem pre-verbal, belonging to a shared visual grammar we carry without quite knowing it. She draws on this grammar fluently, and her titles deepen the effect. Playful, spare, and intuitively resonant, they do not so much name the works as rhyme with them, nudging the viewer toward their own associative leaps. A title arrives like a small recognition: of course!
 
Mari Andrews earned her BFA from the University of Dayton, Ohio, where she studied art and sociology. Traveling west, she completed her MFA at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Upon graduating, Andrews worked at Gemini Press in Los Angeles before heading north to San Francisco, where she worked at Crown Point Press for over two decades. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship and several residencies including Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside CA, the Cold Press north of London, the Lucid Art Foundation, and most recently the James Castle House Residency. Her work can be found in the collections of the de Young Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, CA, and the Eli Broad Foundation, and in private and corporate collections in the US and abroad. Andrews has exhibited extensively throughout California and the US, including the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Bolinas Museum, the Los Gatos Museum, the de Saisset Museum, the Monterey Museum of Art, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and the Tucson Museum of Art and the Sun Valley Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include the solo survey The Whole in Part (Chandler Gallery, San Francisco, 2026) presenting sculpture, drawings, and prints spanning more than thirty years, and she has also exhibited in Japan, Israel, and England. Andrews lives and works in the Bay Area.