Ellen Driscoll

Ellen Driscoll, FastForwardFossil; Part 2, #2 harvested plastic, 30'L x 7'H x 14'W, 2009, Smack Mellon.

Ellen Driscoll (born 1953) is a New York-based American artist, whose practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation and public art. 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. 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. 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." She has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, New-York Historical Society, Boston Center for the Arts, Contemporary Arts Center, and Smack Mellon. and Whitney Museum.

Early life and career Driscoll was born in 1953 into a large Irish-Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts. Her early sculpture was abstract and inspired by furniture and architecture.

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. These archetypal, sometimes foreboding objects—resembling totems, obelisks, horns, gyres, and vessels—suggested archeological artifacts or tools, their functions inexplicable or long-forgotten. Reviews described them as both elegant and primitive In 2013, she joined the faculty of Bard College as a professor and program director of studio arts.

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 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.

Ellen Driscoll, As Above, So Below, Lenape creation story, mosaic, 1998, 45th St. crosspassage, Grand Central Terminal, New York.

Public art projects Driscoll has produced a number of permanent public artworks that engage the specific geography and history of their sites, while also connecting to universal themes involving movement across time and place.

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.

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. 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. These cautionary works spanned 19th-century industry and 21st-century global upheavals involving development and resource exploitation, critiquing contemporary culture's over-dependence on fossil fuels, rampant consumption, geopolitical imbalance and economic volatility. 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. Massachusetts Cultural Council, Siena Arts Institute, Brown Foundation/Dora Maar House, and Artists Foundation. and residencies from the Banff Centre for the Arts, Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, Pilchuck Glass School, Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italy) and Sirius Art Centre (Ireland), among others.

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, Harvard Art Museums, Hood Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum,