There are artists committed to a spiritual path who use it to justify what they do in their art. There are artists committed to a spiritual path who feel they cannot possibly do justice to it in their work. There are artists committed to a spiritual path who accept the challenge of compromising neither their art nor their spiritual discipline in the objects they create; and it is to this last category that Roberta Marks belongs.

Her collages, paintings, and assemblages are traces, reminders, vestiges of her assiduous journeying and struggle – of her ultimate acceptance, too, of a universe that stretches from the stars to boxes of old clothes. We have to look long, and longingly, at these images of what is already past and that make that past present: (re)creations that exclude both resignation and any illusion of redemption; simple, subtle explorations of our very own world, so sad and so sublime.

Harry Mathews