Boston
Boston Sculptors Gallery
Rosalyn Driscoll’s concern throughout her career has been haptic studies, the investigation of tactility. She has sometimes invited viewers to don blindfolds, touch, and guess the materials—wood, metal, stone, leather, pebbles—used in her constructions. Her new work takes a different but logical direction. Driscoll’s material of the moment is rawhide. She shapes it wet over a form, encouraging it to follow her ideas but never knowing how the skin will change as it dries. There’s a good deal of happy accident here—the hide in Homage to Turner curls up like surf and breaking waves—the curing process even provided some white froth. (I feel sure this piece was titled after the artist saw the result.) The translucence of rawhide is exploited to good effect in large pieces stretched over cubical frames, tans and browns overlapping in abstract ways. Driscoll plays off the organic aspects of the skins by combining them with hard-edged contemporary materials such as copper tubing and neon tubes. Depending on whether she uses or conceals the beauties of rawhide, her work ranges from visually luscious to grotesque. Revelation, sensuous and rich, is at the sumptuous end of the spectrum.…see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
