Ellen Driscoll

[21][22][23][24] 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.

[32][31] 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.

"[3][12][14] 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.

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.

[34][3][2] 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.

[35][30] For Ahab's Wife (Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1998), she reimagined that undeveloped, silent female character from 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.

[5][20][2] As Above, So Below (1992–9, MTA Arts for Transit) is a suite of thirteen large mosaic, glass and bronze murals and related reliefs installed in the northern passageways of New York's Grand Central Terminal (at 45th, 47th and 48th streets) that combine iconic forms, multicultural designs, and photographic imagery digitized to pointillist effect.

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.

[1][51][8] They included drawings and unwieldy, ghostly landscapes of miniature vernacular structures (bridges, mills, oil rigs and refineries, dredging cranes), McMansions, abandoned shacks, and abstracted landmasses that employed disorienting shifts of scale and perspective.

[1][52][53] 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.

[54][52] "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.