Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of being builds itself eternally. Everything parts, everything greets itself again; the ring of being remains loyal to itself eternally. [...] The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In her most recent body of work, Sam Moyer has harnessed the graphic qualities of stone to generate a sense of movement and transformation. The result is a group of paintings in which stone coils, spills, drips, hovers, teeters precariously and curls back into itself. Animated by gesture and motion, these works suggest that something unseen has occurred—a mysterious catalyst that fuels their growth or has knocked them out of stasis. Not privy to the cause or its aftermath, we witness only the suspended moment of transition and wonder at what transfigurative force might make stone behave with the fluidity and nimbleness of ink or paint.

The genesis of this shift in Moyer’s work can be located in her series of fern paintings, two of which are included in Relief. In these works, line and pattern determine the fronds’ direction and rate of growth, the way they arch and bend into and away from their neighbors. The looseness and organic quality of the ferns ushered in a new approach to the stone paintings; where in previous works Moyer allowed for the characteristics of the stone to inform their placement in the composition—much as one might when building a stone wall—here Moyer calls on the traditions of drawing and painting, exploring pictorial space rather than constructing architectonic arrangements.