Publication

HEART IN THROAT, HEAD IN HANDS; TONGUE IN KNOTS, HEART ON SLEEVE
INSTALLATION BY ELISABETH HIGGINS O’CONNOR
SUYAMA SPACE, SEATTLE
ELISABETH HIGGINS O’CONNOR
HEART IN THROAT, HEAD IN HANDS; TONGUE IN KNOTS, HEART ON SLEEVE
SUYAMA SPACE, SEATTLE | JANUARY 19 – APRIL 25, 2015
PREFACE
Beth Sellars, Curator
We first became aware of Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor’s
creations when she was at the University of Washington,
Seattle in early 2014, working as the Visiting Artist/Lecturer
in Ceramic Sculpture at the 3D4M studios. She returned to
Seattle in late 2014 to begin fabrication of her large family of
haunting figures that fill the gallery and stairway. The work
was labor intensive with tiny detail applications applied to
ever expanding creatures that loomed overhead.
Many hands and hours were required to achieve the artist’s
intentions. Most notable for their volunteer work with cutting,
painting, hammering, retrieving and dismantling Craigslist
couches, were Ashleigh Robb, Gail Grinnell, Melodie Reay,
Penny Young Miller, Helen Gamble, Matthew Sellars and Ben
Wildman, as well as Elisabeth’s assistant, Daniel Mendoza.
We are most grateful for their amazing assistance.
Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor is currently a resident of
Sacramento, California. She has worked primarily in
California since the mid-1990s, receiving her B.F.A. from
California State University, Long Beach in 1995 and her
M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis in 2005.
O’Connor has shown extensively up and down the west
coast of California in solo and group exhibitions, as well as
several exhibitions in the Midwest. The grants, fellowships
and awards she has received include a 2005 Joan Mitchell
Foundation M.F.A. Fellowship; multiple research and
graduate fellowships from the University of California, Davis
in 2004 and 2003; and a 2012 Artist-in-Residence Award
from Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska.
Elisabeth has taught studio art classes at CSU Long Beach
and UC Davis and currently teaches drawing and sculpture
at Sacramento City College.
We wish to thank Elisabeth for her herculean efforts, and
her volunteers for their significant assistance. Thank you
to 4 Culture/King County Lodging Tax Fund and our valued
Suyama Space Friends, both of whose support is essential
to our ongoing programming.
“Every time we read a text, we author it in our own image”
– Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger
Renny Pritikin
In Genesis God can just speak and the world comes
into existence. The creator can speak again and matter
becomes life. Unlike God, people—and artists like our Ms.
O’Connor—must use their hands to mold reality and can
transform raw matter into life only in folklore, as in the case
of the golem. In Jewish legend the golem is a rough melding
of scraps, dust and backyard mud that comes to life to do the
maker’s bidding, a bizarre mirror image of the perfection of
divine creation, and often a cause for deep regret because the
golem is hard to control. Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor makes
her own golems out of odds and ends and riff raff. Like all
golems they are mute, and have an aura of psychological
potency. In Hebrew the difference between life and death is
slim—the difference between “emet” (life) and “met” (death).
A golem comes to life with the insertion of a slip of paper
into its mouth onto which is written emet, and is killed
by erasing the first “e.” O’Connor’s creatures are made of
cloth and wood and other scraps that simultaneously have
undeniable personality and presence and at the same time,
utter vulnerability. Like the replicants in Blade Runner they
aggressively crowd us in their stumbling awkward will to live.
O’Connor is a maker of sculpture, refugee perhaps but still
objects, showing in a gallery committed to the ongoing
recapitulation of the possibilities of site specific installation.
Its weathered wooden ceiling, overhead beams and floor
dominate Suyama Space. O’Connor’s solution to the
challenge is to bring visual unity to the space through the
wooden supports of her sculpture. These are pieces of thrift
store furniture stripped of all the upholstery and padding,
down to wood and springs, and serve as legs or de facto
stands for the works and form a third layer of horizontal
brown stuff to organize the mid-level plane for the eye. The
figures are “creatures from the id” as described in Forbidden
Planet, let loose in the gallery to run amok tearing things up,
one even falling down the staircase in its zeal and magically
returning to sticks and rags. Think Gremlins for the wit;
think woven textures of great complexity and dexterity for
the aesthetic pleasure.
The works have a genealogy that runs through Judy Pfaff
and Sarah Sze on one side of the family. Kathryn Spence’s
bears, made of rolled up thrift store raincoats and bathrobes
slathered in mud, is in there too. In fact the entire history of
women and fabric, sewing and crochet is referenced, both
in homage and in travesty. The large-scale figurative work
of Louise Bourgeois and Thomas Houseago come to mind
on another tangent as well as the improvised anti-aesthetic
of Melissa Pokorny.
I was in the midst of the lowest point of my life in 1981. In a
dream at the time, I was walking through a vague landscape
when suddenly out of nowhere an immense and horrifying
black, shapeless entity leaped out at me. It was my internal
golem unleashed and turning on me. I awoke screaming
for the first and only time in my life. Elizabeth O’Conner
was probably a toddler at the time, but I had crossed paths
with her sculpture, in a weird kind of aesthetic time travel,
experiencing her artwork before it was made. The works
embody the aching imperfections of human endeavor. We
tell ourselves that God brought the world into being by
speaking. The act of making art is a form of Presque vu,
arriving somewhere you don’t recognize but know you have
been before, reinventing the world over and over through
time, back and forth between emet and met.
Renny Pritikin is the chief curator of The Contemporary
Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and a senior adjunct
curator in curatorial practice at California College of the Arts,
whose fourth book of poetry, “A Quiet in Front of the Best
Western,” was published in December 2014.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
The work could be described as beleaguered, bedraggled,
distressed and distorted animal-ish figures. They seem
burdened with a physical and internal history, stretched to
some limit, layered with materials building up and tearing off.
I appreciate the embedded concepts these cast-off household
textiles carry: domesticity, comfort, childhood, familial
history, birth, death, sex and dreamtime. Obliquely narrative,
My work is not necessarily about “nature”—but perhaps an
intersection of nature and culture. I use animal-like forms
to investigate our deep historic connections to animals as a
motif in literature and fables which can be an entry point for
viewers, something familiar to reach for that hopefully allows
for fuller engagement with the less apparent ideas at play.
The weight of the materials that goes into building requires
the use of “crutches” and the skeletons of sofas have been
employed to help things stand in an intentionally awkward
manner. I want the struggle to stand upright to be easily
perceived; the fatigue, gravity, vulnerability and weakness
to be present, but also a tough urgency, a resiliency.
www.elisabethhigginsoconnor.net
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This exhibit and publication is made possible through
funding from 4Culture/King County Lodging Tax Fund and
Suyama Space Friends.
Edition of 500 copies published by Suyama Space; all rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
without written permission from the publisher.
Exhibition Dates: January 19 – April 25, 2015
Suyama Space
2324 Second Avenue, Seattle, WA 98121
PHOTO BY BETH SELLARS
Existing somewhere on a spectrum between elegy and
absurdity, I’m examining a setting where the cautionary tale,
private anxieties and natural history museum dioramas
mash-up...and attempting to close the gap between
tenderness and the grotesque.
the work walks a narrow line between many polarities; pathos
and disgust, accretion and loss, joy and heartache. These
themes merge with my interest in posture, gesture, and the
rendering of expressions. As well, it is a way to convey my
engagement in formal concerns, process, materiality and the
marks and decisions left by my hand.
PHOTO BY BETH SELLARS
My interests in the under-noticed yet overwhelming, the
marginal yet monumental inform my practice. Abandoned
boxes, couches, discarded bedclothes, blankets, pillows,
cushions and knit Afghans gathered and donated from thrift
stores and Craigslist are cut, re-sewn, ripped, wrapped,
roped, stiffened, tied and built into objects that seem to be
simultaneously shrouded yet exposed, armored and patched
but disintegrating, the comfy rendered uncomfortable.
www.suyamaspace.org
Director: George Suyama
Curator and Publication Coordinator: Beth Sellars
Photographer: Mark Woods unless otherwise noted
Graphic Design: Sarah Shapiro Design
Printer: Litho Craft
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