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. 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.
Early life and career
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."
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. In 2013, she joined the faculty of Bard College as a professor and program director of studio arts.
Work and reception
Installation works, 1990s
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.Silver, Joanne. "Tug of invisible forces links sculptor's works," The Boston Herald, February 4, 1993.