generations
Nine rectangular forms come out of the ground. These seem to me burial monuments. Our dear deaths are protected in carefully crafted enclosures. It gives us peace to know where our loved lay. Every time we want we remember and honor them.
They lay in old earth, where also our older ancestors lay. Ancestors who once lived, worked, celebrated, loved, commemorated and honored. We shall be laid in the earth also. Hopefully we also will be remembered and praised.
Ursula von Rydingsvard dares to show these topics. The dead is not current. The media prefers to show topics like healing, rejuvenation, life extension, performance, result.
But still let’s talk about death, sustainability, life stages, passing of values. Let us agree together what we want to learn from the previous generations, and the space we like to offer for the generations to come.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
generaties
Negen rechthoekige vormen komen uit de aarde. Dit zijn volgens mij grafmonumenten. Lieve doden liggen beschermd in zorgvuldig gemaakte omhulsels. Het geeft ons rust dat wij weten waar onze dierbaren liggen. Steeds als wij dit willen kunnen wij hun herdenken en eer bewijzen.
Zij liggen in onze oude aarde, waar ook onze oudere voorouders liggen. Voorouders die ooit leefden, werkten, vierden, liefhadden, herdachten en eer bewezen. Ook wij worden in de aarde gelegd. Hopelijk worden wij ook herdacht en geprezen.
Ursula von Rydingsvard durft deze thema’s te tonen. De dood is niet actueel. Liever gaat in de media de aandacht uit naar genezing, verjongingskuur, levensverlenging, prestatie, resultaat.
Maar laten wij het toch hebben over de dood, duurzaamheid, levensfasen, het doorgeven van waarden. Laten wij samen afspreken wat wij willen leren van vorige generaties en welke ruimte wij willen bieden voor toekomstige generaties.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.oliverranchfoundation.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard is an internationally known artist who creates monumental works usually in cedar, that evoke her Polish heritage, her childhood in Polish refugee camps in Germany, childhood games, and connection to an ancestry of Polish peasant farmers. A graduate of Columbia University, New York, von Rydingsvard taught at Yale University from 1982 to 1986, during which time she helped open doors for the next generation of artists, including several notable women.
Iggy's Pride, 1990-1991, von Rydingsvard’s monumental private commission for the Oliver Ranch, is generally considered to be her site-specific tour-de-force. Looking for a 'psychologically compatible place,' von Rydingsvard chose an intimate site opposite a stunning deep view. She chose to carve into the side of the hill, excavating a 77 foot earth shelf on top of which she placed nine 17 foot cedar wedges.
Iggy's Pride, Ursula von Rydingsvard carved 40,000 pieces of cedar beams over a 13-monthd to form a sculpture consisting of nine 17-1/2 foot long, 7 foot high wooden wedges that touch each other in the back. The nine wedges were cut and glued on site. Graphite was then applied with a brush and scrubbed to reveal some of the cedar surface. The cedar over time, with exposure to sun, turns silver. This sculpture is meant for meandering through as well as to be seen from above and below. The sculpture is set in a nitch in a hillside, with a concrete retaining wall against which the wedges rest.
www.thewomensstudio.net:
German-born American sculptor, Ursula von Rydingsvard, is known for her large-scale, monumental, abstract wood sculptures whose shapes refer 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 md 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 sculpture, 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:
While 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' idia 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 they estalish a rapport 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 Rydingsvare, 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.
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.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."
Nine rectangular forms come out of the ground. These seem to me burial monuments. Our dear deaths are protected in carefully crafted enclosures. It gives us peace to know where our loved lay. Every time we want we remember and honor them.
They lay in old earth, where also our older ancestors lay. Ancestors who once lived, worked, celebrated, loved, commemorated and honored. We shall be laid in the earth also. Hopefully we also will be remembered and praised.
Ursula von Rydingsvard dares to show these topics. The dead is not current. The media prefers to show topics like healing, rejuvenation, life extension, performance, result.
But still let’s talk about death, sustainability, life stages, passing of values. Let us agree together what we want to learn from the previous generations, and the space we like to offer for the generations to come.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
generaties
Negen rechthoekige vormen komen uit de aarde. Dit zijn volgens mij grafmonumenten. Lieve doden liggen beschermd in zorgvuldig gemaakte omhulsels. Het geeft ons rust dat wij weten waar onze dierbaren liggen. Steeds als wij dit willen kunnen wij hun herdenken en eer bewijzen.
Zij liggen in onze oude aarde, waar ook onze oudere voorouders liggen. Voorouders die ooit leefden, werkten, vierden, liefhadden, herdachten en eer bewezen. Ook wij worden in de aarde gelegd. Hopelijk worden wij ook herdacht en geprezen.
Ursula von Rydingsvard durft deze thema’s te tonen. De dood is niet actueel. Liever gaat in de media de aandacht uit naar genezing, verjongingskuur, levensverlenging, prestatie, resultaat.
Maar laten wij het toch hebben over de dood, duurzaamheid, levensfasen, het doorgeven van waarden. Laten wij samen afspreken wat wij willen leren van vorige generaties en welke ruimte wij willen bieden voor toekomstige generaties.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.oliverranchfoundation.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard is an internationally known artist who creates monumental works usually in cedar, that evoke her Polish heritage, her childhood in Polish refugee camps in Germany, childhood games, and connection to an ancestry of Polish peasant farmers. A graduate of Columbia University, New York, von Rydingsvard taught at Yale University from 1982 to 1986, during which time she helped open doors for the next generation of artists, including several notable women.
Iggy's Pride, 1990-1991, von Rydingsvard’s monumental private commission for the Oliver Ranch, is generally considered to be her site-specific tour-de-force. Looking for a 'psychologically compatible place,' von Rydingsvard chose an intimate site opposite a stunning deep view. She chose to carve into the side of the hill, excavating a 77 foot earth shelf on top of which she placed nine 17 foot cedar wedges.
Iggy's Pride, Ursula von Rydingsvard carved 40,000 pieces of cedar beams over a 13-monthd to form a sculpture consisting of nine 17-1/2 foot long, 7 foot high wooden wedges that touch each other in the back. The nine wedges were cut and glued on site. Graphite was then applied with a brush and scrubbed to reveal some of the cedar surface. The cedar over time, with exposure to sun, turns silver. This sculpture is meant for meandering through as well as to be seen from above and below. The sculpture is set in a nitch in a hillside, with a concrete retaining wall against which the wedges rest.
www.thewomensstudio.net:
German-born American sculptor, Ursula von Rydingsvard, is known for her large-scale, monumental, abstract wood sculptures whose shapes refer 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 md 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 sculpture, 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:
While 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' idia 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 they estalish a rapport 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 Rydingsvare, 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.
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.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."