For 40 years, the sculptor Michele Oka Doner has been working with textures culled from the sea’s edges—reeds, corals, sponges and driftwood. Her obsession was born early, on Miami Beach. “The place didn’t start with Miami Vice. It wasn’t always about neon,” she says. “There’s a picture of me at two years old, crawling in the littoral zone [the surf]. That world imprinted me.” Her latest works, still true to her marine theme but now incorporating the human form as a canvas for her textural play, are on view in “Human Nature,” at Marlborough Chelsea through January 3, and in a new book of the same title, published by Charta. “Even in college I was interested in the figure,” explains Oka Doner. “But I’ve changed the skin to reflect what I’ve always known.” The 15 sculptures in the show include small, delicate porcelains resembling dolls and several renditions of torsos in bronze, porcelain and stone. In the latter group is the recently completed Angry Neptune. More than six feet tall, the cast-bronze signature work resembles both a monumental piece of petrified wood and a torso with legs. 

"Catching The Drift" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.