Elise Siegel

Elise Siegel (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York City. She is known for several bodies of figurative work that use subtle and ambiguous gesture and facial expression to evoke psychic and emotional states. In the 1990s, she first gained recognition for garment-like constructions that blurred boundaries between clothing, skin and body, critiquing the roles fashion and plastic surgery play in the construction of sexual and cultural identity; After shifting to clay as her primary material, Siegel was one of a number of artists in the 2000s whose work spurred a rebirth in figurative ceramics emphasizing emotional expression, social conditions, identity and narrative. Her ceramic work—which ranges from roughly modeled portrait busts to highly charged, theatrical installations—is said to capture fleeting moments of internal struggle, conflict and vulnerability, creating a psychological tension with the viewer. Elise Siegel, rough edges, partial installation view, twelve ceramic portrait busts on plywood stands, busts approx. 24”- 28”, overall dimensions variable, 2019, Studio10, Brooklyn, NY.

Siegel has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), The Museum at FIT, Mississippi Museum of Art, Chazen Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art and the Third World Ceramic Biennale in South Korea, among others. She has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work belongs to the public art collections of MFAH and the Chazen Museum of Art. Siegel has taught ceramics at Greenwich House Pottery since 1984. The sculpture's rough, tangled construction equated garment straps—both intimate and strangling—with medical bandages, while its frayed, faded edges and Frankensteinian wire stitching evoked struggle and damage, conveying a sense of horror regarding the movement to surgery as reinvention, which wounded as much as enhanced women.

Elise Siegel, Into the room of dream/dread, I abrupt awake clapping, eight life-size ceramic figures on wooden chairs, overall dimensions variable, 2001, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Figurative ceramic installations and sculpture In the mid-1990s, Siegel returned to clay, looking for a more immediate, tactile material from which to create directly figurative work. The figures were colored a dull, even gray and modeled in doughy fashion, with simple, punched-in eyes, detailed extremities, and separately fired heads set on small wedges so they could be rotated to fix the gazes. In Twenty-four Feet (2004), Siegel placed two neat rows of girls—lower bodies only—seated on facing chairs without seat bottoms, exposing them from below. This work draws on historical empowered objects, such as the Jōmon period Dogū and Haniwa funeral figures of prehistoric and third-to-sixth-century Japan, respectively, European iron helmets, Renaissance reliquary busts, idols and African masks. Their fleshy features range in modeling from naturalistic to lumpy and crude, with glazing that shifts from subtly layered patina-like surfaces to provisional and raw; most are fired in two pieces, leaving a visible crack at the base of the neck. and Yaddo (1986), the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2014, and Canada Council (1982, 1981).