Gabriel Stromberg:
Earth Sign

Gabriel Stromberg: Earth Sign
April 9 - May 9, 2026
Artist Talk with Lauren Gallow: May 9, 3-4pm

In his latest exhibition Earth Sign, Seattle-based artist and designer Gabriel Stromberg explores how material and form can convey stories of memory, place, and provenance. In a series of ceramic sculptures and accompanying collages, medium serves as testimony—giving physical shape to the process of recollection.

Informed in part by his early life growing up in rural communities along the Gulf Coast, the works in Earth Sign evoke elements from these past environments—landscapes, waterways, interiors. Artifacts, objects, and shifting landforms are distilled into simplified sculptural compositions that emphasize pattern, accumulation, erosion, and growth.

Rather than depicting subjects directly, Stromberg translates them into elemental forms and abstracted tableaux. A curve suggests a shoreline. Individual pieces resemble objects that might have been found and kept, their significance rooted in a sense of time and location. The works are constructed through a process of assembling, echoing the idea of collecting and preserving. Stromberg’s training as a graphic designer informs this approach. He relies on the basic vocabulary of shape, color, and composition to communicate how experience is reduced, organized, and ultimately remembered.

Clay is central to the work both materially and conceptually. As a substance drawn from the earth, it carries a direct physical connection to nature. Its transformation through construction and firing—from soft and malleable to solid and permanent—parallels the process of memory itself. Fleeting impressions become fixed over time, taking on lasting permanence.

The works function as both sacred objects—cherished possessions, family heirlooms, sigils for manifestation—and physical records. Shapes and colors serve as condensed expressions of lived experience, mapping memory into form and holding it in a state of preservation.