Ellen Driscoll

Ellen Driscoll (born 1953) is a New York-based American artist, whose practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation and public art.

She is known for complex, interconnected works that explore social and geopolitical issues and events involving power, agency, transition and ecological imbalance through an inventive combination of materials, technologies (rudimentary to digital), research and narrative.

Her artwork often presents the familiar from unexpected points of view—bridging different eras and cultures or connecting personal, intimate acts to global consequences—through visual strategies involving light and shadow, silhouette, shifts in scale, metaphor and synecdoche.

Driscoll was born in 1953 into a large Irish-Catholic family in Boston,Massachusetts.

After studying painting and sculpture at Wesleyan University (BFA, 1974), she moved to New York, where she earned an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University (1980) and worked for artists Alice Adams, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Mary Miss and Columbia professor and sculptor William G. Tucker.

Her early sculpture was abstract and inspired by furniture and architecture.

In the 1980s, she exhibited in group shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, among other venues.

Between 1987 and 1990, solo exhibitions at the Damon Brandt, Paolo Salvador (both New York) and Stavaridis (Boston) galleries brought Driscoll recognition for more organic wood, lead and copper sculptures with a medieval sensibility that explored cultural memory and alchemy.

These archetypal, sometimes foreboding objects—resembling totems, obelisks, horns, gyres, and vessels—suggested archeological artifacts or tools, their functions inexplicable or long-forgotten.

Driscoll frequently blackened or covered the sculptures with skins of lead and oxidized copper whose ornamental, handcrafted effect contrasted with their primal form.

Reviews described them as both elegant and primitive with a "strange eloquence"; New York Times critic Michael Brenson called them "organic, anthropomorphic machines" conveying humor and impressions of "destruction and renewal, victory and defeat."

By the early 1990s, critics such as The New York Times's Charles Hagen noted Driscoll's turn toward installation art bringing "her awareness of the expressive possibilities of abstract shape and her sensitivity to material" to bear on politically and psychologically resonant historical events.

This new conceptual work examined themes involving boundary crossing, social and personal histories, knowledge and its relation to memory, experience and sensation.

In three installations, Driscoll combined projected imagery, kinetic constellations of objects and symbolic groupings, creating fluid experiences described as "a cross between primitive filmmaking and antique hallucinations."

The Loophole of Retreat (Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, 1991) was inspired by the Harriet Jacobs autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which traced her journey from slavery and sexual abuse, through seven years of hiding (in the dark, oppressive eaves above her grandmother’s house, her only contact with the world a small peephole), and finally, freedom.

The installation's centerpiece was a large cone with a door that was constructed of salvaged wooden planks and placed on its side, which echoed Jacobs's claustrophobic hiding space.

A small hole turned its interior into a camera obscura projecting enigmatic, Plato's cave-like images of suspended objects rotating on a large wheel outside the dwelling; a portico of floating, battered doric columns casting shadowy forms surrounded the structure.

Critics suggested the work's central inside-out metaphor addressed historical facts of slavery and racism while touching on broader, relevant psychological and perceptual ideas, such as the relationship between vision and power, contradictions between physical constraint and psychological freedom, and the ultimate loneliness of individual experience.

During this period, Driscoll began teaching sculpture, principally at Rhode Island School of Design, where she would serve as a professor from 1992 to 2013.

Driscoll used similar means in Migration (Contemporary Arts Center and MassArt, 1992–3) and Passionate Attitudes (Thread Waxing Space and Real Art Ways, 1995).

As Above, So Below (1992–9, MTA Arts for Transit) is a suite of thirteen large mosaic, glass and bronze murals and related reliefs installed in the northern passageways of New York's Grand Central Terminal (at 45th, 47th and 48th streets) that combine iconic forms, multicultural designs, and photographic imagery digitized to pointillist effect.

The overall work forms a visual anthology of ancient and modern cosmological stories that relates to the terminal concourse's historic painted constellation ceiling and connects the daily commute to global time travel; its depicted subjects include Aboriginal and Celtic narratives, the Egyptian goddess Nut, Persephone, Sisyphus, Einstein, and a recurrent train traveling a circular path.

From There On Up to Here and Now (1994, High Museum of Art) was an installation that Driscoll created with African-American quilters in the Atlanta area focusing on personal iconography and histories.

For Ahab's Wife (Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1998), she reimagined that undeveloped, silent female character from Melville's Moby-Dick as an explorer with a powerful presence; the project's performance work and exhibition was anchored by an enormous hoopskirt that mutated between clothing, platform, shelter, screen, blowhole and a roiling sea engulfing and disgorging the heroine.

The temporary public project, Mum’s the Word (Boston, 1998) placed 48 paired outdoor banners created in collaboration with aphasia patients on bridges, which served as metaphors for brain-related communication disorder.

Driscoll has produced a number of permanent public artworks that engage the specific geography and history of their sites, while also connecting to universal themes involving movement across time and place.

In 2000, Sculpture critic Patricia C. Phillips wrote that Driscoll's installations were informed by "an abiding fascination with the lives and stories of people whose voices and visions have been suspended, thwarted, undermined, or regulated."

Discussing later work, Jennifer McGregor wrote, "Whether working in ghostly white plastic, mosaic, or walnut and sumi inks, [Driscoll's] projects fluidly map place and time while mining historical, environmental, and cultural themes."

Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Anonymous Was a Woman, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, New-York Historical Society, Boston Center for the Arts, Contemporary Arts Center, and Smack Mellon.

Her work belongs to public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum.

Catching the Drift (2003) and Aqueous Humour (2004) involved water-related themes.

For the former, Driscoll created a fanciful aquatic environment in a women’s restroom at Smith College's Brown Fine Arts Center employing blue slip-glaze imagery of waves, fishing nets, hooks, sea life and artworks from the museum's collection that extended to sinks, toilets and an encircling frieze of glass panels.

Aqueous Humour consisted of three interactive mosaic tables in the South Boston Maritime Park, built with movable outer rings that shifted port-related fishing, immigration and marine biology designs.

Filament/Firmament (2007, Cambridge Public Library) and Wingspun (2008) involved socio-historical approaches.

The former is a two-story installation examining women's work (textile arts, in particular), roles and contributions to the city of Cambridge through text, 240 circles of etched glass depicting global textile designs, and a geometric network of woven tension cables suggesting interconnectivity.

In 2013, she joined the faculty of Bard College as a professor and program director of studio arts.

The latter work examined early studies of the female body and psyche conducted by neurophysician J. M. Charcot, in which he used hypnosis, probes and electrical stimulation to induce states of the 19th-century medical construct hysteria in women patients.

The installation—described as "nearly omnivorous in its intellectual appetite" by Art in America's Nancy Princenthal—featured fabric chambers set into heavy-steel frames of hospital beds that functioned as camera obscuras, projecting ethereal images of a slowly turning constellation of objects, including spinning braids, onto suspended pillows.

Three collaborative projects similarly gave voice to the under-represented.