[Reader-list] [Announcements] Lecture by Ellen Driscoll

[Dean School of Arts and Aesthetics]

Slide Lecture by sculptor
E l l e n D r i s c o l l
School of Arts and Aesthetics Gallery

24th January 4pm

All are cordially invited

Ellen Driscoll is a Professor of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design.  Her work includes installations such as “The Loophole of Retreat” (Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, 1991), and “Passionate Attitudes” (Threadwaxing Space, New York, 1995), public art projects such as “As Above, So Below” for Grand Central Terminal (1999), a suite of 20 mosaic and glass works for the tunnels at 45th,47th and 48th streets, “Catching the Drift”, a women’s restroom for the Smith College Museum of Art (2003), and “Aqueous Humour”, a kinetic sculpture for the South Boston Maritime Park (2004). Ms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Anonymous Was a Woman, the LEF Foundation, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute.  Her work is included in major public and private collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art.

Artist statement
My work in sculpture, drawing, and public art is drawn from diverse sources such as architecture, the ancient memory arts, and primitive imaging techniques such as shadow play. As an artist I am drawn to making things through bricolage, and the happy unpredictable chances that materials, sites, and social histories can suggest. Through this process, I set up unpredictable encounters in which viewers are asked to make an imaginative whole out of disparate parts, in the way that the protective architectural form of a magpie’s nest is built from a scrap of cloth, a shiny piece of wire, and selected twigs.
 I am also fascinated by cycles of decay and regeneration. For example, the strange phenomenon of a phantom limb still feeling sensation, is evidence of our brain circuitry re-wiring itself to compensate for loss. I see my work as an imaginative parallel to this biological phenomenon.. I am also interested in different forms of paradox; motion and stasis, weight and weightlessness, light and dark, wholeness and fragmentation are all held in tension in the physical act of encountering my work. 
 Using materials as disparate as LEDs, Roman style mosaic, cloth, newspaper, steel, and glass, my work presents an ancient idea borne out by the most recent research into genome mapping-- that underneath what is seemingly “unlike” is a more profound affinity. In the words of Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, “Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile… But these are only the outward appearances of a single common substance that ...if stirred by profound emotion...may be changed into what most differs from it.”  



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