Which material should you choose to work with for your next sculpture? Wood, Metal, plaster? How about rawhide? I bet you haven’t worked with this particular material yet! Rawhide is Rosalyn Driscoll’s medium of choice in her most recent show at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Natural Light.
Driscoll first came across rawhide while she was in New Mexico for an artists’ residency. She was in a drum store and saw a painting on rawhide. After some conversing with people at the store and figuring out that it could be shipped to her, it was an obvious choice for Driscoll that she wanted to work with this material. Driscoll’s father used to own ranch land so her current pieces connect her to her past. Driscoll also is drawn to the rawhides ability to hold form, translucence, and irregularities.
So what draws Driscoll to create art with this material is the fact that the rawhide allows her to make forms that are organic. Driscoll was looking for a way to enliven and mobilize rectilinear forms that she was working with, so what better material to use than a form of skin. Her work is also about containment as well as being rectilinear and how skin is the ultimate container. Driscoll also added some neon lights in her rawhide pieces to amplify the feel of energy in certain pieces. She also used the lights because she was attracted to the transparency of rawhide.
In her piece shown here, Revelation, Driscoll was trying to show that things encounter our quiet, orderly world unexpectedly, for example when someone dies suddenly, or a job changes. The rawhide resembles a hand is passing through this square box that is lined with copper leaf.
As for Driscoll’s future direction, she says she will continue to explore working with rawhide to take it to its next phase. In the spring she will be working in London with some other artists who will be putting together a show on touch and other sensory forms of art. Lastly, she is also collaborating with a neuroscientist. Submitted by Jen Costa, Boston Sculptors Gallery intern
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ReplyDeleteThank you for a very interesting article on outsider art. I greatly appreciate the time you take to do all the research to put together your posts. I especially enjoyed this one!!