Both Carpel Tunnel and Bad Brush consist is a dense roughly sawn wooden lower section surmounted with thin myrtle stems with intact bark, closely set together and bundled by large wooden screws joining tapped sections of wood.  In Carpel Tunnel the crepe myrtle stems continue the plumb verticality of the lower wooden element; in Bad Brush the crepe myrtle stems are similarly constrained, but nevertheless are splayed like the bristles of a brush gone bad.  The difference of sustained, compacted verticality and of a verticality splaying beyond the constraint is subtle, but substantial, for the felt constraint is not merely that of the constraining elements within the works, but ultimately of gravity as a natural force.

The suspended work White Spine/Black Spine depends on gravity for the insistent verticality of the orientation of the axis of the two components.  Around and extending from these axis, horizontal elements extend, less at the top, more at the bottom, blades of ceiling fans multiplying and bending.  Between the two components the negative volume of each component is implied as an inverted volume.

In contrast to White Spine/Black Spine, Black Bone, Above the Thunder, and Jesse’s Steps are gestural lines bending as a sprout bends under the effect of phototropism.  Black Bone, Above the Thunder, and in somewhat more limited and vestigial manner Jessie’s Steps, consolidate the segmentation of White Spine/Black Spine to the central axis itself.

In marking a position in space, Maxwell’s sculpture inevitably responds to and references the architectural space of the gallery, as framed by the white walls demarking the limits of a void against which the gesture of the work can be gauged, and as a plane on which the trace of the sculpture qua shadow is projected.2

Maxwell’s drawings are materially traces of the sculpture, being drawn with charcoal made from the wood scraps produced in carving.  More saliently, the drawings continue the gestural abstraction of the sculpture in another area of practice, responding to the field of the sheet as the sculpture references the architectural space in its installation.  The marks are mainly oriented parallel to the plan of the paper, with a limited suggestion of depth developed primarily through massing of value and variation in line weight and speed of the mark.  The delicacy of mark, and confidence of touch and ecriture parallel the strength of facture of the sculpture, each the alterity of the other medium.