Coming To Our Senses

A new solo exhibition opening September 2 - October 11, 2025 at Michael Warren Contemporary, Denver.

I began this series by asking the question…”Why can’t we speak to each other?”

To investigate- I’ve made works that in the words of Mike McClung, Co-owner and Gallery Director says, “Nancy uses clay to convey multi-sensory experiences of being in the mountains. Lovendahl draws attention to sight, smell, sound, speech and touch with seductive surfaces that are burnished as if the sun, wind, and water had worn them down over millennia.” The intention of these artworks is reconnection to our common link - human nature - as a drop in the ocean of humanity’s memory. Like Lincoln said, "the better angels of our nature" in his 1861 First Inaugural Address, urging Americans to overcome their divisions through shared memory and affection to preserve the Union, rather than succumbing to conflict.

“Listen or Your Tongue Will Make You Deaf”

A proverb used as title, as translated by The Cherokee Nation, 2024, 60” x 96” x 4”, Slip cast and press molded ceramic, resin and mixed media

My sculptural installation uses the 2020 US census as a departure point.  Each form is colored to identify the racial data collected. Creating 206 parts over 2 years, I proportioned the census data to visually show who we are as a nation: 

57.8% White, 18.9% Hispanics, 12.4% Blacks, 6.3% Asians and 2% Native and Islander Nations.  5% are mixed race people.

I have taken license to exaggerate some colors to capture an essence of race or personal orientation - and omitted others to reflect those who were left out of the census altogether.

Each of these sculptural parts are unique and one-of-a-kind but made from the same mold sources. 

The Quadrants

I got my degree in ceramics motivated to work using the earth itself. My early years in the 1990’s were consumed with wall murals looking at the earth from an aerial view. This language came back to me in 2018 preparing for a solo show in Denver. Observations of the way humans survey the actual landscape has always mystified me. Pure squares and oblique angles that have absolutely nothing to do with the contours of real areas on the ground, became a theme to incorporate in these new quadrant map forms. Using physical rocks as an allusion to mountain shapes, colored glossy resins for water issues of the west, monopoly scaled houses to suggest residences and textured topographical surfaces with etched in roads and rivers all added to the multiple bright glazes, capturing the differences between environments in a fantastical way.