The "Out There" series attempts to examine our planet and its atmosphere, how our actions affect it, and its relationship to the universe. I was inspired originally by seeing pictures of earth taken by astronauts from space—but on further examination of the images I realized that the damage we have done to our atmosphere, for example by raging fires (the oil fields in Kuwait, forest fires in the western U.S.) has created grave dangers and concerns for our future.

"Out There" is a series of wall-mounted, suspended and free standing sculptures that occipied me from 1993 to 1997. They explore the orbits of the planets and their moons--each one has a fixed orbit, and as long as each remains in its correct orbit, the universe will remain calm. If, however, one should be knocked out of orbit, chaos will ensue.

So, in a sense, we are always on the edge--and in this group of "Out There" sculptures I have tried to capture, in abstract terms, the rhythms, the movements, the precarious continuum of the energy that activates our universe. A process that hopefully will be infinite.

— Ann Sperry

In Sperry's series, far is also near. What populates space and stretches in all directions into infinity exists not only outside the human body but also, in some very important way, within it. While Sperry's steel reliefs, cut from the tops or bottoms of boilers and hung on the wall like trophies or shields, suggest stars and planets seen by the eye, they also suggest bellies and wombs. While they are astronomical images with surfaces detailed enough to reward visual exploration, they are at the same time so physical in their bulk that they occupy the same world of weight and mass we do. Just as important, these disks, as well as the small orange–or grapefruit-sized spheres or hemispheres circling or ejecting from two of the astral bodies, are tactile. So while these images of space suggest a visual orientation toward the heavens, they also appeal, in all their order and chaos, to our hands. The sense of immediacy is reinforced by widespread evidence of emergency. Scars of destruction, even winds of apocalypse, are suggested in some of the circles, particularly in the blackness that can make a sculptural skin or a rubbing of a steel disk seem charred. Sperry's steel drums beat sounds of wonder but also of warning.

— Michael Brenson, 1997