Following the critically acclaimed Camels installation at the Whitney Museum in 1969 and a period focused solely on painting, Graves returned to sculpture in the 1980s with renewed experimentation. Graves became one of the first contemporary artists to experiment with bronze casting, whereby she organized cast bronze objects, typically food and plants, into asymmetrical sculptures that addressed notions of balance and space. Inspired by Pablo Picasso, David Smith, Alexander Calder, and post-cubist sculptors who explored tension and spatial dynamics, Graves assembled unlikely and precarious forms that hover between balance and imbalance, movement and stillness. In Orthoarc, she incorporated mundane found objects such as a vintage waste paper basket and a metal bracket, and combined them into a composition of painted cast natural elements such as the lobster claw plant (heliconia).
Using found objects, Graves collaborated with Pichard Polich of the Tallix Foundry New York, to cast ephemeral and natural materials in metal. Without relying on preparatory sketches, she worked in an improvisational manner, assembling her gravity defying sculptures intuitively. Her process emphasized a sense of balance, exploring the tension between gravity and weightlessness. The resulting works have a subdued color palette. Graves employed three primary methods to apply color to her sculptures: patination, fired enamel, and polyurethane paint, fusing the color to the metal and giving the sculptures their distinct finish and striking coloration.
- The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA, Nancy Graves: Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper 1/12/2001.
- Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, Nancy Graves: The Shining, Elusive Element 10/14/2005 - 11/12/2005
- Texas Gallery, Houston, TX, USA, Nancy Graves: Paintings and Sculptures of the 1980's 9/8/2011 - 10/30/2011
- Kotik, Charlotta, Elizabeth Enders: Landscape/Language/Line, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT, 2009, p. 19 illus.
- Stein, Judith E., Nancy Graves: The Shining, Elusive Moment, Nancy Graves: The Shining, Elusive Element, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 2005, pp. 7, 8, 24 and 25 illus.