Artist:
Ursula von Rydingsvard
Title:
Skip to My Lou
Year:
1997
Adress:
Microsoft Campus
Website:
Art Nature Dialogues:
UvR (Ursula von Rydingsvard) I made Iggys Pride on the Oliver Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, California. Steve Oliver, who commissioned the piece, doesn't really want art objects and I feel there is somethig very courageous about commissioning outdoor sculptures. Its so different from the stuff you hang on the wall. You can walk between the wedges and don't feel overpowered. You don't feel any aggression when you're around them.
JG (John K. Grande) You have achieved a very sublte balance. It doesn't dominate, and instead fits so neatly into the land surface.
UvR Internally, I hate when an artist creates contrived impositions on the land. It feels unnatural and depressing. Skip to My Lou (1997), at Microsoft California Main Campus, is another work that uses letters. I built them up from letters and a dance that I did with my assistants. We all held hands an I drew around their feet. I drew a plumb line from their elbows down to the floor at the point their hands joined. I made them go around in a circle in a very rugged way, very quickly, and had them stop, then drew the points. That, in part, is what influenced the configurations in Skip to My Lou. Another influence was an Indian tribe who lived there. I saw some of the rattles and boxes they had made. Their understanding of the ocean, of the way it worked, felt so profound, and they indicated that on the surfaces of the boxes. So that there is a little bit that I took from that, but it is really a much more complicated mixture. But those three things - the letters, the dance, and the Indian artifacts - all affected my making of the piece.
JG The coastal tribes used to follow the top of the wave when they were traveling by canoes, so less energy was used. They never fought nature's energy. They followed nature's energy lines. UvR That sort of summrizes their life's philosophy.
JG There is this language thing again, folding in the culture ... it's like the writing process. At a given point you are no longer in control of it and a spirit energy enters. The rest is automatic and the words come as if by magic.
UvR I think that is kind of what the creative process is. Mama, your Legs (2000), one of my most recent pieces, was so much fun to make. It has all of these bowls and seven motors that lifted the solid cedar inner portions of the bowls up. I call them thighs, but they are really like mortar and pestles that get lifted up and down slowly - all at different times. You can hear the sound of the wood hitting against wood. There is an echo, a really dull, laborious echo that you hear again and again. There is this point where you almost disavow that you really had that much of an input. It's search, a groping. You become a vehicle. Its is the life of it.
www.sculpturemagazine.art:
JGC (Jan Garden Castro) How does your staff work with you?
UvR (Ursula von Rydingsvard) I spend a tremendous amount of time with my assistants; they are like family to me. We have lived together at different sites for many months at a time. Bart Karski is the head of my studio, with two full-time and some part-time people, depending on the project. On May 12, we celebrated Bart’s 10th anniversary. He came to me at the age of 17. The celebration involved close to 60 assistants from the past. Our main goal was to get together, cook the best dishes we’ve ever cooked, and to share them with one another.
JGC On your recent trip to Japan, were there some discoveries—or anything you saw that seemed old and familiar?
UvR There were unknowns in the Japanese culture and visual arts that bowled me over—images that felt as though they were contained in some predetermined way, but within that containment, there were unpredictable spurts of energy. I recall sitting inside an old Japanese structure built very much like a teahouse and looking out the windows and seeing the outdoors framed in a calculated way. It was an amazing way to direct visuals. It doesn’t feel as though we think that way here in America. You see this kind of self-cJapanese art, architecture, clothing—all aspects of their lives. No sooner do I say this, than I also see sandwiched into their imagery and writing, a torn, out-of-control moment.
Regarding seeing things that felt familiar, I visited a small village in a region called Shirakawa-go, way up in the mountains, and I happened to go there at a moment when it was snowing very lightly, very gently. The Gassho-style homes there in which the people continue to live reach far into the Japanese past.2 They are thickly thatched A-frame structures. The wooden beams are tied together with sisal rope. There are no nails, dowels, beams, or screws. It was truly amazing to wander through these attics and to see their things—hammers with long curved noses, backpacks made out of sisal and wood, and incredible grain scoops made out of bark. There is a parallel and also a real difference between what I saw in those mountains and what I would see in the mountains of Europe, especially in Poland.
I was also bowled over by 1,000 life-size Buddhist deities at Sanjusangen-do. They were lined up on stepped levels. Diagonally and horizontally, to the left and to the right, the lines of deities seemed to go on to infinity. The overlappings of the eroded gold on wood and the very slender lines that came out of their heads gave me a feeling of being immersed in a forest of ancient holy stuff that has no concreteness; it excited my peripheral vision.
JGC It occurs to me that there was something both ancient and familiar about your retrospective at the Nelson-Atkins Museum.
UvR I don’t focus on creating work that belongs in any time zone. I loathe being an artist connected with a style done in 2002, the 1950s, or even 600 B.C.E. I think there’s a way I’m trying to talk about my own time that is directed more by my own psychology than by chronological years.
www.thewomensstudio.net:
German-born American sculptor, Ursula von Rydingsvard, is known for her large-scale, monumental, abstract wood sculptures whose srefer obliquely to objects in the real world. She sculpts massive chunks from cedar beams to create dramatic compositions with textured, faceted surfaces. Her ragged configurations loosely suggest fossils, rocky canyons, open-mouthed beasts, body parts, cresting waves, or mythological creatures.
Von Rydingsvard spent the first five years of her life in a forced labor camp in Germany where her father was conscripted to work for the Nazis during World War II. After the war, the large family lived in eight different displaced persons camps throughout Germany before they were able to immigrate in 1950 to a working-class town in Connecticut. She graduated from the University of Miami and became a teacher to support her husband attending medical school. After their divorce in 1973, she moved to New York City as a single mother with a daughter to support.
The 1970s New York art scene was a fertile place for her, and she began an M.F.A. in sculpture at Columbia University. There she initially worked with welded steel but found the metal too rigid. She didn’t like the coldness of Minimalism associated with metals nor their smooth finishes. So she turned to wood and wood’s textured surfaces near the end of her studies in 1975. She mostly uses cedar, a wood that is pliable and allows for varied compositions. She uses precut industrially milled cedar four-by-fours, that are associated with construction work. She stacks them up and saws into them leaving each beam gashed, scarred, and scrubbed with powdered graphite. Her sinuous shapes are on a massive, primal scale, achieved through her labor-intensive work helped by her team of assistants.
www.oxfordartonline.com:
Von Rydingsvard attributed her affinity for wood to her heritage of Polish peasant farmers and her own memories of growing up in wooden barracks and churches. This familiarity with wood, along with the neutrality of the pre-cut beam, gave her the freedom to manipulate the material. Rather than preparing sketches of the finished sculpt von Rydingsvard was guided by her intuition; a process she described as working through her anxieties and uncertainties.
Using this organic, but manufactured material, her work explores the historical and ongoing relationship between humans and nature (e.g. Song of a Saint (Saint Eulalia), 1979; Lewistown, NY, Artpark, now destr. and Iggy’s Pride , 1990–91; Sonoma Valley, CA, Oliver Ranch and Skip to My Lou , 1997; Washington, DC, Microsoft Corporation).
The rhythm and repetition in her sculptural forms, installed in outdoor spaces as well as in galleries, also relate to the daily rituals she witnessed as a child in church, to the seasonal cultivation of the land and to the domestic chores in the home. Mama, Your Legs (2000; New York, Gal. Lelong), a motorized sculpture in which wooden blocks strike the interior of wooden vessels in repetitious thuds, alludes to the churning of butter, or as the title may suggest, a worn and pained body that refuses to stop.
www.thewomensstudio.net:
e Rydingsvard rejected Minimalism, she did adopt one aspect of it: serial repetition as seen in her 1987 breakthrough work 'Zakopane.' She considers this among her most significant sculptures because it alludes to her personal history since its title refers to the town in Poland where her mother lived. Her 1996 'Ocean Floor' is a mixed-media work ornamented with protuberances made from stitched cow intestines. Her 2008 horror piece 'Droga' looks as if it might crawl across the floor – head down and gaping mouth open – ready to devour anyone. One of her latest and most unusual works is the 2017 'Powerwac,' made in collaboration with a team of technicians. It is a gigantic leather motorcycle jacket, stitched from the dissembled pieces of nearly two hundred garments from thrift stores. It was shown at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
Art Nature Dialogues:
The siting of works and use of earthbound materials make Von Rydingsvard's sculptures most interesting for trt between nature's history and human history. Memories of farm life and agararian roots in Poland, of survival in German refugee camps, and of simple wooden churches, implements, and dwellings, establish an unusual rapport between the primary materials heritage. Sensitivity to site likewise plays a rol in Ursula von Rydingsvard;s sculpture, as does the use and history of language.
JG (John K. Grande) There is an uncertainty in your work. You take shapes, put things together, reassemble and carve the forms, but they remain tentative. It is as if you believe there is an inherent ambiguity in the structures themselves. The wood and materials you use have a structure of their own, and you recombine tehm in a kind of additive process.
UvR (Ursula von Rydingsvard) That's right. The material - and this is so important - doesn't even look natural.
www.wikipedia.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard (born 26 July 1942) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugee camps for displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC's Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (Ceta).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington."
UvR (Ursula von Rydingsvard) I made Iggys Pride on the Oliver Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, California. Steve Oliver, who commissioned the piece, doesn't really want art objects and I feel there is somethig very courageous about commissioning outdoor sculptures. Its so different from the stuff you hang on the wall. You can walk between the wedges and don't feel overpowered. You don't feel any aggression when you're around them.
JG (John K. Grande) You have achieved a very sublte balance. It doesn't dominate, and instead fits so neatly into the land surface.
UvR Internally, I hate when an artist creates contrived impositions on the land. It feels unnatural and depressing. Skip to My Lou (1997), at Microsoft California Main Campus, is another work that uses letters. I built them up from letters and a dance that I did with my assistants. We all held hands an I drew around their feet. I drew a plumb line from their elbows down to the floor at the point their hands joined. I made them go around in a circle in a very rugged way, very quickly, and had them stop, then drew the points. That, in part, is what influenced the configurations in Skip to My Lou. Another influence was an Indian tribe who lived there. I saw some of the rattles and boxes they had made. Their understanding of the ocean, of the way it worked, felt so profound, and they indicated that on the surfaces of the boxes. So that there is a little bit that I took from that, but it is really a much more complicated mixture. But those three things - the letters, the dance, and the Indian artifacts - all affected my making of the piece.
JG The coastal tribes used to follow the top of the wave when they were traveling by canoes, so less energy was used. They never fought nature's energy. They followed nature's energy lines. UvR That sort of summrizes their life's philosophy.
JG There is this language thing again, folding in the culture ... it's like the writing process. At a given point you are no longer in control of it and a spirit energy enters. The rest is automatic and the words come as if by magic.
UvR I think that is kind of what the creative process is. Mama, your Legs (2000), one of my most recent pieces, was so much fun to make. It has all of these bowls and seven motors that lifted the solid cedar inner portions of the bowls up. I call them thighs, but they are really like mortar and pestles that get lifted up and down slowly - all at different times. You can hear the sound of the wood hitting against wood. There is an echo, a really dull, laborious echo that you hear again and again. There is this point where you almost disavow that you really had that much of an input. It's search, a groping. You become a vehicle. Its is the life of it.
www.sculpturemagazine.art:
JGC (Jan Garden Castro) How does your staff work with you?
UvR (Ursula von Rydingsvard) I spend a tremendous amount of time with my assistants; they are like family to me. We have lived together at different sites for many months at a time. Bart Karski is the head of my studio, with two full-time and some part-time people, depending on the project. On May 12, we celebrated Bart’s 10th anniversary. He came to me at the age of 17. The celebration involved close to 60 assistants from the past. Our main goal was to get together, cook the best dishes we’ve ever cooked, and to share them with one another.
JGC On your recent trip to Japan, were there some discoveries—or anything you saw that seemed old and familiar?
UvR There were unknowns in the Japanese culture and visual arts that bowled me over—images that felt as though they were contained in some predetermined way, but within that containment, there were unpredictable spurts of energy. I recall sitting inside an old Japanese structure built very much like a teahouse and looking out the windows and seeing the outdoors framed in a calculated way. It was an amazing way to direct visuals. It doesn’t feel as though we think that way here in America. You see this kind of self-cJapanese art, architecture, clothing—all aspects of their lives. No sooner do I say this, than I also see sandwiched into their imagery and writing, a torn, out-of-control moment.
Regarding seeing things that felt familiar, I visited a small village in a region called Shirakawa-go, way up in the mountains, and I happened to go there at a moment when it was snowing very lightly, very gently. The Gassho-style homes there in which the people continue to live reach far into the Japanese past.2 They are thickly thatched A-frame structures. The wooden beams are tied together with sisal rope. There are no nails, dowels, beams, or screws. It was truly amazing to wander through these attics and to see their things—hammers with long curved noses, backpacks made out of sisal and wood, and incredible grain scoops made out of bark. There is a parallel and also a real difference between what I saw in those mountains and what I would see in the mountains of Europe, especially in Poland.
I was also bowled over by 1,000 life-size Buddhist deities at Sanjusangen-do. They were lined up on stepped levels. Diagonally and horizontally, to the left and to the right, the lines of deities seemed to go on to infinity. The overlappings of the eroded gold on wood and the very slender lines that came out of their heads gave me a feeling of being immersed in a forest of ancient holy stuff that has no concreteness; it excited my peripheral vision.
JGC It occurs to me that there was something both ancient and familiar about your retrospective at the Nelson-Atkins Museum.
UvR I don’t focus on creating work that belongs in any time zone. I loathe being an artist connected with a style done in 2002, the 1950s, or even 600 B.C.E. I think there’s a way I’m trying to talk about my own time that is directed more by my own psychology than by chronological years.
www.thewomensstudio.net:
German-born American sculptor, Ursula von Rydingsvard, is known for her large-scale, monumental, abstract wood sculptures whose srefer obliquely to objects in the real world. She sculpts massive chunks from cedar beams to create dramatic compositions with textured, faceted surfaces. Her ragged configurations loosely suggest fossils, rocky canyons, open-mouthed beasts, body parts, cresting waves, or mythological creatures.
Von Rydingsvard spent the first five years of her life in a forced labor camp in Germany where her father was conscripted to work for the Nazis during World War II. After the war, the large family lived in eight different displaced persons camps throughout Germany before they were able to immigrate in 1950 to a working-class town in Connecticut. She graduated from the University of Miami and became a teacher to support her husband attending medical school. After their divorce in 1973, she moved to New York City as a single mother with a daughter to support.
The 1970s New York art scene was a fertile place for her, and she began an M.F.A. in sculpture at Columbia University. There she initially worked with welded steel but found the metal too rigid. She didn’t like the coldness of Minimalism associated with metals nor their smooth finishes. So she turned to wood and wood’s textured surfaces near the end of her studies in 1975. She mostly uses cedar, a wood that is pliable and allows for varied compositions. She uses precut industrially milled cedar four-by-fours, that are associated with construction work. She stacks them up and saws into them leaving each beam gashed, scarred, and scrubbed with powdered graphite. Her sinuous shapes are on a massive, primal scale, achieved through her labor-intensive work helped by her team of assistants.
www.oxfordartonline.com:
Von Rydingsvard attributed her affinity for wood to her heritage of Polish peasant farmers and her own memories of growing up in wooden barracks and churches. This familiarity with wood, along with the neutrality of the pre-cut beam, gave her the freedom to manipulate the material. Rather than preparing sketches of the finished sculpt von Rydingsvard was guided by her intuition; a process she described as working through her anxieties and uncertainties.
Using this organic, but manufactured material, her work explores the historical and ongoing relationship between humans and nature (e.g. Song of a Saint (Saint Eulalia), 1979; Lewistown, NY, Artpark, now destr. and Iggy’s Pride , 1990–91; Sonoma Valley, CA, Oliver Ranch and Skip to My Lou , 1997; Washington, DC, Microsoft Corporation).
The rhythm and repetition in her sculptural forms, installed in outdoor spaces as well as in galleries, also relate to the daily rituals she witnessed as a child in church, to the seasonal cultivation of the land and to the domestic chores in the home. Mama, Your Legs (2000; New York, Gal. Lelong), a motorized sculpture in which wooden blocks strike the interior of wooden vessels in repetitious thuds, alludes to the churning of butter, or as the title may suggest, a worn and pained body that refuses to stop.
www.thewomensstudio.net:
e Rydingsvard rejected Minimalism, she did adopt one aspect of it: serial repetition as seen in her 1987 breakthrough work 'Zakopane.' She considers this among her most significant sculptures because it alludes to her personal history since its title refers to the town in Poland where her mother lived. Her 1996 'Ocean Floor' is a mixed-media work ornamented with protuberances made from stitched cow intestines. Her 2008 horror piece 'Droga' looks as if it might crawl across the floor – head down and gaping mouth open – ready to devour anyone. One of her latest and most unusual works is the 2017 'Powerwac,' made in collaboration with a team of technicians. It is a gigantic leather motorcycle jacket, stitched from the dissembled pieces of nearly two hundred garments from thrift stores. It was shown at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
Art Nature Dialogues:
The siting of works and use of earthbound materials make Von Rydingsvard's sculptures most interesting for trt between nature's history and human history. Memories of farm life and agararian roots in Poland, of survival in German refugee camps, and of simple wooden churches, implements, and dwellings, establish an unusual rapport between the primary materials heritage. Sensitivity to site likewise plays a rol in Ursula von Rydingsvard;s sculpture, as does the use and history of language.
JG (John K. Grande) There is an uncertainty in your work. You take shapes, put things together, reassemble and carve the forms, but they remain tentative. It is as if you believe there is an inherent ambiguity in the structures themselves. The wood and materials you use have a structure of their own, and you recombine tehm in a kind of additive process.
UvR (Ursula von Rydingsvard) That's right. The material - and this is so important - doesn't even look natural.
www.wikipedia.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard (born 26 July 1942) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugee camps for displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC's Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (Ceta).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington."