Artist:
Ursula von Rydingsvard
Title:
Song of a Saint, Saint Eulalla
Year:
1979
Adress:
Artpark (removed)
Website:
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 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.thewomensstudio.net:
Her first mature work was her 1979 'Song of a Saint (Eulalia)' now dismantled. It consisted of 180 cedar poles scattered over a hillside at Artwork in Lewiston, New Yo was the first of several pieces where she was able to work outdoors on an ambitious scale. 'I love working with the land, making relationships between my piece ... and the curves of the earth.'
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' 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 'PODERWAC,' made in collaboration with a team of technicians. It is a gigantic leather motorcycle jacket, stitched from the dissembled pieces of nearly two hunt 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 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.
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."
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 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.thewomensstudio.net:
Her first mature work was her 1979 'Song of a Saint (Eulalia)' now dismantled. It consisted of 180 cedar poles scattered over a hillside at Artwork in Lewiston, New Yo was the first of several pieces where she was able to work outdoors on an ambitious scale. 'I love working with the land, making relationships between my piece ... and the curves of the earth.'
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' 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 'PODERWAC,' made in collaboration with a team of technicians. It is a gigantic leather motorcycle jacket, stitched from the dissembled pieces of nearly two hunt 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 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.
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."