Document Lisbon is pleased to present Language-like, a solo exhibition by Elizabeth Atterbury and the artist’s first in Portugal. Based in Portland, Maine, Atterbury creates sculptures in wood, clay, stone, and metal that echo everyday objects, alongside wall-based works made with raked mortar.

The sculptures in Language-like are crafted from wood, metal, and stone, forming a unified visual language that blurs the lines between found and made objects. Some forms are instantly familiar—a lock, a shell, a leaf—while others defy simple recognition, existing in a space between the symbolic and the abstract. A similar oscillation between biography and abstraction operates in Peanut III, which is premised on a childhood gift from the artist’s now departed mother: a larger-than-life size ceramic peanut shell that opens to reveal two smaller nuts snugly nested inside.

Monochromatic white, wall-hung mortar pieces adorn the gallery walls, their raked surfaces emphasizing a patchwork of interlocking abstract forms. These forms, cut from a single rectangular plywood board, covered with mortar, and raked meticulously are then pieced together like puzzles. The resulting image is whole, yet marked by voids and cracks where material has been lost, akin to a ceramic bowl that has been broken and imperfectly reassembled. These spaces create a drawing, forming a playful and complex composition of intersecting shapes.

Throughout her practice, Atterbury is interested in questions of legibility and opacity, improvisation and play, and object-making and remaking as ways to think through her interrupted family histories and Chinese American heritage. Drawing from memories, genealogy, and the day-to-day, she creates symbols and characters, forming her own vocabulary of forms that are both deeply personal and relatable.