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Ellen Driscoll (born 1953) is a New York-based American artist, whose practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation art and public art.McGregor, Jennifer. "Fluid Perspectives: Ellen Driscoll," Sculpture, October 1, 2018. Retrieved August 26, 2022.Phillips, Patricia C. "The Proportions of Paradox: The Work of Ellen Driscoll," Sculpture, November 2000.Princenthal, Nancy. "Ellen Driscoll," Art in America, June 1995. 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.Koplos, Janet. "Ellen Driscoll's Passages," Art in America, June 2000.Riley, Jan. "Finding Resonant Details in a Big Picture: A Conversation with Ellen Driscoll," Sculpture, January 1, 2011. Retrieved August 26, 2022.Kaplan, Cheryl. On the Waterfront: An Interview with Ellen Driscoll by Cheryl Kaplan, Spokes Press, 2009. Retrieved August 26, 2022. 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.Hagen, Charles. "When the Outside World is Danger," The New York Times, December 27, 1991. Retrieved August 28, 2022.Dykstra, Jean. "Ellen Driscoll and Fernando Souto, Smack Mellon," Art in America, January 2010. 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 Inkstick, 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.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Ellen Driscoll, Fellows. Retrieved August 26, 2022.Anonymous Was a Woman. "Recipients to Date." Retrieved August 26, 2022.Ivey, Bill, Nancy Princenthal and Jennifer Dowley. A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment of the Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001. She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris,Melrod, George. "Ellen Driscoll at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris," Art in America, June 1992. New-York Historical Society,Cotter, Holland. "At Historical Society, Emancipation Remains a Work in Progress," The New York Times, June 20, 2006. Retrieved August 28, 2022. Boston Center for the Arts, Contemporary Arts Center,Temin, Christine. "Ellen Driscoll," The Boston Globe, February 1993. and Smack Mellon. Her work belongs to public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lost Geography, 1987, Ellen Driscoll, Collection. Retrieved August 26, 2022. and Whitney Museum.Whitney Museum. Ellen Driscoll, Zoetrope driven by iron shoes on wheels, 1990, Collection. Retrieved August 26, 2022.
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.Brenson, Michael. "Ellen Driscoll," The New York Times, May 25, 1990. Retrieved August 28, 2022.Birkerts, Sven. "Ellen Driscoll," Art New England, Summer 1987. The New York Times Magazine. "New Faces for the New Season," August 30, 1987. Retrieved August 26, 2022.Westfall, Stephan. "Ellen Driscoll at Damon Brandt," Art in America, March 1987. 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.Cyphers, Peggy. "Ellen Driscoll," Cover, May 1988.Przybilla, Carrie. "Ellen Driscoll," Equal Rights and Justice, Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 1994. 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.Bard College. "Esteemed Artist Ellen Driscoll To Join Bard College Faculty as Professor of Studio Arts," News, November 12, 2012. Retrieved August 26, 2022. In 2013, she joined the faculty of Bard College as a professor and program director of studio arts.Bard College. Ellen Driscoll, Faculty. Retrieved August 26, 2022.
In three installations, Driscoll combined projected imagery, kinetic constellations of objects and symbolic groupings, creating fluid experiences described as "a cross between primitive filmmaking and antique hallucinations." The Loophole of Retreat (Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, 1991) was inspired by the Harriet Jacobs autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which traced her journey from slavery and sexual abuse, through seven years of hiding (in the dark, oppressive eaves above her grandmother’s house, her only contact with the world a small peephole), and finally, freedom. The installation's centerpiece was a large cone with a door that was constructed of salvaged wooden planks and placed on its side, which echoed Jacobs's claustrophobic hiding space. A small hole turned its interior into a camera obscura projecting enigmatic, Plato's cave-like images of suspended objects rotating on a large wheel outside the dwelling; a portico of floating, battered doric columns casting shadowy forms surrounded the structure. Critics suggested the work's central inside-out metaphor addressed historical facts of slavery and racism while touching on broader, relevant psychological and perceptual ideas, such as the relationship between vision and power, contradictions between physical constraint and psychological freedom, and the ultimate loneliness of individual experience.
Driscoll used similar means in Migration (Contemporary Arts Center and MassArt, 1992–3) and Passionate Attitudes (Thread Waxing Space and Real Art Ways, 1995). The latter work examined early studies of the female body and psyche conducted by neurophysician J. M. Charcot, in which he used hypnosis, probes and electrical stimulation to induce states of the 19th-century medical construct hysteria in women patients. The installation—described as "nearly omnivorous in its intellectual appetite" by Art in America's Nancy Princenthal—featured fabric chambers set into heavy-steel frames of hospital beds that functioned as camera obscuras, projecting ethereal images of a slowly turning constellation of objects, including spinning braids, onto suspended pillows.
Three collaborative projects similarly gave voice to the under-represented. From There On Up to Here and Now (1994, High Museum of Art) was an installation that Driscoll created with African-American quilters in the Atlanta area focusing on personal iconography and histories.Lota, Louinn. "Equal Rights and Justice," High Performance, Winter 1994. For Ahab's Wife (Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1998), she reimagined that undeveloped, silent female character from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as an explorer with a powerful presence; the project's performance work and exhibition was anchored by an enormous hoopskirt that mutated between clothing, platform, shelter, screen, blowhole and a roiling sea engulfing and disgorging the heroine.Jowitt, Deborah. "Beyond human," The Village Voice, September 23, 1998.Johnson, Ken. "Ahab's Wife, Ignored in 'Moby-Dick,' Tries Again," The New York Times, August 28, 1998. Retrieved August 26, 2022.Dunning, Jennifer. "Ahab's Wife Dreams, and the Whale Speaks," The New York Times, September 9, 1998. Retrieved August 28, 2022. The temporary public project, Mum’s the Word (Boston, 1998) placed 48 paired outdoor banners created in collaboration with aphasia patients on bridges, which served as metaphors for brain-related communication disorder.Temin, Christine. "Bridging the Divided Mind," The Boston Globe, August 26, 1998.
Catching the Drift (2003) and Aqueous Humour (2004) involved water-related themes. For the former, Driscoll created a fanciful aquatic environment in a women’s restroom at Smith College's Brown Fine Arts Center employing blue slip-glaze imagery of waves, fishing nets, hooks, sea life and artworks from the museum's collection that extended to sinks, toilets and an encircling frieze of glass panels.Geran, Monica. "Awash in Artistry," Interior Design, January 2004.MacMillan, John. "Flush with Art," Smith College Alumnae Quarterly, Spring 2003.Rooney, Megan. "Taking Art Sitting Down," The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2003. Aqueous Humour consisted of three interactive mosaic tables in the South Boston Maritime Park, built with movable outer rings that shifted port-related fishing, immigration and marine biology designs.Carlock, Marty. "Ellen Driscoll and Carlos Dorrien," Sculpture, March 2005.Carlock, Marty. "Urban Design," Landscape Architecture, October 2004.
Filament/Firmament (2007, Cambridge Public Library) and Wingspun (2008) involved socio-historical approaches. The former is a two-story installation examining women's work (textile arts, in particular), roles and contributions to the city of Cambridge through text, 240 circles of etched glass depicting global textile designs, and a geometric network of woven tension cables suggesting interconnectivity.Temin, Christine. "Watching a sculptor shape a memorial," The Boston Globe, June 1, 2005. Wingspun is an 800-foot glass mural portraying inhabitants throughout North Carolina's history that serves as a membrane between the Raleigh–Durham International Airport's international and domestic terminals.
With later projects, Driscoll extended her interests to the resilience of the natural world in the face of sociopolitical threat.Wei, Lilly. "Considering Red Hook," Soundings: Margaret Cogswell, Ellen Driscoll, Brooklyn, NY: Kentler International Drawing Space, 2015. The Boston Globe. "The Ticket," May 17, 2017. Retrieved August 28, 2022. The sumi and walnut ink drawings in her "Soundings" (2015) and "Thicket" (2017) exhibitions blended ochre, umber and coffee-colored silhouettes and spectral imagery of ivy skeins, volunteer plants, birds, clothing, skeletal billboards, abandoned loading docks and honeycombed structures into liminal topographies of land and water, culture and nature, ruin and rebirth.Durant, Mark Alice. "Lost Cartography," Thicket: New Work 2014–6, Ellen Driscoll, New York: Ellen Driscoll, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2022. "Soundings" offered an immersive, composite past-present portrait of Red Hook, Brooklyn that critic Lilly Wei described as mundane and fluid, shifting from abstraction and dissolution to sharp realistic focus in an exploration of adaptability, transition, transformation and ephemerality. "Thicket" included soft sculptures partially attached to walls—some printed with tangled tree imagery—that suggested clothing patterns and city plans or topographical maps cut into cloth (e.g., Stilt, 2014).
Driscoll's work belongs to the public collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Boston Public Library, Detroit Institute of Arts, Fralin Museum of Art,Fralin Museum of Art. Passionate Attitudes, Ellen Driscoll, Objects. Retrieved August 26, 2022. Harvard Art Museums,Harvard Art Museums. People, Ellen Driscoll, Collections. Retrieved August 26, 2022. Hood Museum of Art,Hood Museum of Art. Ellen Driscoll, Portrait, Objects. Retrieved August 26, 2022. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rose Art Museum,Rose Art Museum. Ellen Driscoll, Artist. Retrieved August 26, 2022. Smith College Museum of Art,Smith College Museum of Art. "Museum Restrooms as Functional Art," Brown Fine Arts Center. Retrieved August 26, 2022. and Whitney Museum, among others.University of Michigan Museum of Art. Window, Ellen Driscoll, Resources. Retrieved August 26, 2022.
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