Carol Cornelison: A Return to Nature
July 7 through October 8, 2006
In the Annex Gallery

Click Here for more images...

Carol Cornelison's sculpture expresses spiritual states of being through basic raw materials from the earth. Her sculptures are assemblages consisting of human, animal and vegetable parts, all cast in bronze. The artist conceives of her work as "materials, parts and experience--fragments, which are constructed into different installations/environments. Each of these fragments is regarded by me as a vestige of personal experience, a moment in time, a snatch of memory." Through her incorporation of found objects, Cornelison combines various detritus she has found in the world (both industrial and natural) into a new, cohesive realm of meaning in the sculptural landscapes she creates. Moreover, the meaning of her sculpture usually references the idea of recycling, which she enacts within its very composition. In this way, she combines various ideas derived from her own personal experience with objects and forms found in the world to create a new meaning within her sculpture.

Cornelison's works tend to be decidedly feminine because they often have to do with reproduction and transformation, or creating something new out of the remaining fragments of the past. The title piece of the show, A Return to Nature, consists of four hybrid sculptures that have female bodies with rabbit heads. Referring to the rabbit's reproductive reputation, the sculptures of A Return to Nature, as well as the Hare series, signify the continuously repetitive renewal that occurs ad infinitum. Propped on tall, uncertain stick legs, the sculptures in A Return to Nature and The Three Graces are reminiscent of the elongated figures of Surrealist sculptor Alberto Giacometti; yet, unlike his austere and coherent figures, Cornelison's pieces are more fractured as they invoke the theme of change. While Cornelison reuses human, animal and plant parts in her sculpture, she also pilfers the past to derive meaning in her works. A Return to Nature invokes the many famous female hybrids of classical mythology, while The Three Graces falls into a long history of representing the Greek goddesses of joy, charm and beauty, such as Rubens' work of the same title and Botticelli's Primavera.

By making beauty, female roundness and fertility less of a virtue and more of a struggle filled with an immense amount of energy, the artist departs markedly from her male predecessors. Cornelison's female figures are not images of the female ideal. Rather, in figures such as Grace III we see a great, almost violent, disturbance in the headless female form, recalling the iconic Greek statue The Winged Victory of Samothrace, while Grace II is dramatically marked by a void carved out of the womb, suggesting the inevitable turbulence of reproduction and change that occur in women's lives.

Although these sculptures invoke powerful feelings of struggle as they transform from tree to human to animal, they impart upon the viewer the message that change and self-realization are often difficult, but necessary, experiences. A Return to Nature embraces transformation as a repetitive and on-going natural existential process, something, Cornelison suggests, we should all take comfort in.