Figures in the Fold

This pareidolic hunt finds expression in her hand-built sculptures, made from a blend of porcelain and stoneware. MacPherson’s ceramic forms spiral, undulate, and cascade outward, their symmetry visible from front to back and side to side. Each black-glazed sculpture is displayed against a dark backdrop that catches its silhouette, throwing a second, shifting version of itself onto the wall. Like the photographic negative, the shadow allows for another way of seeing.

Among her most figurative works, The Standing One is paired with a light box containing a portion of the inkblot that inspired it. Holding a printout of the larger, unabridged image, MacPherson points to a face hidden in the foliage; it hovers above the great-grandchildren of Dr. Alva Garrott, Los Angeles’ first African American dentist. From MacPherson’s perspective, this face watches over Dr. Garrott’s descendants, standing guard.

MacPherson, who identifies as a mixed-race Black woman, understands this impulse toward protection as bound up with her own racial in-betweenness. In later photographs of the Garrott family, younger generations appear more mixed, though the archive provides no clear record of their identities, aside from more straightforward, monoracial categorizations. She sees this kind of labeling as flattening a life, reducing it to something easier to name than understand. “When nobody notices you, you don’t feel protected,” she says. 

Her sculptures respond to that feeling. For MacPherson, to look closely—at a photograph, at a face half-hidden in the foliage—is its own form of guardianship. “People just want to be considered, and maybe that’s enough.”