REBROADCAST: Italy’s famed marble quarries continue to beckon and inspire Oregon sculptor

For 40 years, sculptor M.J. Anderson has been making annual trips from her home on the Oregon coast to Carrara, Italy. She spends up to three months there, traveling along a winding road to quarries with towering walls of marble, the same kind of stone that was used to create Michelangelo’s sculpture of David and other timeless works of Renaissance art. 

But Anderson isn’t interested in recreating classical, idealized representations of masculine or feminine beauty. Instead, a unifying theme of Anderson’s work is “the distillation of what it feels like to be woman.” Starting at her studio in Carrara, she uses grinders and air hammers to carve torsos evoking the female form out of massive blocks of marble, onyx and travertine. The pieces are then shipped, unfinished, to Anderson’s studio in Nehalem where she polishes them while retaining drill marks and other raw reminders of the stone’s past and its “power.” We talked with Anderson on Sep. 13, 2025 about her artistic process and the themes she explores in her work.

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