Desire for More: Women, Art, and the Machen Collection
by Dr. Sophia Kidd
The artworks in this exhibition—by Michel Angela Petersen, Maria Wickwire, Karen Adams, Amy Stone, Katherine Sheers, and Carrie McIntyre—have lived together for years, bound by the discerning taste of Bellingham-based collector Richard Machen. This is their first public gathering, an unveiling not only of the works themselves but of Machen’s decades-long devotion to living women artists. His patronage has carried some through success, while others faltered under the combined weight of artmaking, domestic labor, and survival. Their struggles—illness, poverty, resilience—are etched into these works as maps of human existence.
Machen’s collection is more than accumulation. It is care—an adoption of artworks into a family where they acquire new purpose, shaped by their encounter with each other and with him.
British-born Michel Angela Petersen approaches ceramics as both artifact and inquiry, uniting intuitive form with scholarly rigor. Her monumental works—Tattva Mimamsa: Pondering Dualism (2011), Skinny Dipping (2021), and the Icon series—probe mysticism, femininity, and cultural memory. Figures emerge as hybrids, corporeal yet divine, grotesque yet serene. Surfaces of crackled glaze and ochre slip testify to endurance. Petersen resists closure: her clay becomes a site where belief, embodiment, and memory converge.
Katherine Sheers, formerly a lingerie designer, translates vulnerability and erotic autonomy into painting. Her trio When You Held Me Safe, As I Am / As I Broke / As I Healed (2019) stages intimacy, rupture, and restoration in restrained marks and pale grounds. Your Body Moving Under Pleasure (2020) distills sensuality into luminous strokes, while The Dirty Work of Blossoming (2023) magnifies growth as both labor and beauty. Exhibited internationally and shortlisted for The Mother Art Prize (2020), Sheers asserts fragility and resilience as interwoven states of becoming.
Toronto-based Carrie McIntyre works in acrylic and mixed media, where color itself becomes architecture. Her Why So Convoluted (2022) pulses with elongated figures in coral, turquoise, and gold, woven from chromatic rhythm. Serenity Now (2018) dissolves the figure, while Tribal (2018) grounds it in strength. Across her practice, McIntyre charts presence in flux—emotional resonance flickering between kinship, intimacy, and abstraction. Her works resist narrative but radiate vitality.
Karen Adams of Atlanta channels the sea’s erosive and generative force through clay, bronze, and mixed media. Works such as The Shellmaker (2020) and Pelagic Siren (2019) oscillate between strength and fragility, textured with coral and sediment. Her figures emerge as vessels of memory and myth—timeless yet contemporary, bodies as sites of transformation. Adams materializes resonance rather than story, inviting viewers to inhabit the sea’s endless cycles of dissolution and renewal.
From Washington’s Skagit Valley, Maria Wickwire creates figures that embody myth, memory, and resilience. Sculptures such as Eilidh (2021) and Lakshmi (2020) bear antlers, birds, and botanical motifs, grounding them in archetype and local landscape alike. Her figures bend, cradle, and offer, inhabiting fragility and strength simultaneously. Wickwire resists static allegory: her work is presence in process, sculpture as ritual encounter.
Seattle-based Amy Stone paints at the edge of chaos and harmony. Battle Ground (2020) layers washes into improvisatory conflict and renewal; Double Whammy (2020) dissolves the body into abstraction; Everything Is Awesome (2019) explodes with exuberance; and My Beautiful Mess (2021) sprawls across horizontal expanse, a storm of pigment and atmosphere. Gesture, rhythm, and memory fuse into canvases that assert autonomy as living fields of energy.
She’s So Collectible! reminds us that women’s art taps into the spiritual realm through feeling before thought. The female figure—slender or unruly, fit or frail—overwhelms the rational mind, guiding us toward deeper realms of health, wealth, and well-being. Machen’s devotion affirms the beauty of woman in all her forms, and his collection of over 700 works stands as testament. Each artwork, once freed from its maker, gains new life in his care—like a child adopted into a family, shaped by its new surroundings. In this way, the Machen collection is not only an archive of women’s creativity but a living constellation of artworks, alive with purpose, meaning, and desire for more.
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