DONNA DODSON: November News

Monday, November 2, 2015

November News

Avian Inspirations: Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein

November 5, 2015 – January 17, 2016
Showing Concurrently with "The Public Life of Richard Hunt: 21st Century Projects"

Muskegon Museum of Art, Michigan USA

Display by Andy Moerlein

Avian Inspirations is an exhibition of small-scale sculptural work by Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein. Also known as the collaborative team The Myth Makers, Dodson and Moerlein created the monumental Avian Avatars that are sited about downtown Muskegon Michigan. This show is an intimate view into how their individual vocabulary contributes to the larger outdoor pieces.

Donna Dodson’s finely sculpted animal headed goddesses reference ancient archetypes. Her wood sculptures of a vulture, rooster, pea hen, and pheasant each represent unique personality types. These bird-human hybrid figures assume postures of transcendence. Their forms reference Egyptian canopic vessels and Native American totems, lending them a mythic, timeless quality.

Culture Vulture

Ms. Pea Hen

Prodigal Daughter

Delicate Conversations

Moerlein’s birds, perched on branches and ledges, are a familiar sight, a pause for a creature otherwise seemingly in constant movement. A still bird carries an inherent sense of impending action, but in Moerlein’s work the moment is frozen, and the birds locked in place. They stand as sentries, or settled into rest on twisting, organic structures that are characters themselves. Boulders rest precariously atop narrow branches, or fungal forms hang like decks above spindly legs. And through these, the birds sit, caught in their own narratives, unmoved by the complexity around them, looking outward or to each other alone.

Unsion by Andy Moerlein

In seeing the individual works of Dodson and Moerlein, the audience can find the genesis of the Avian Avatars, and better understand the inspirations of their form and materials. Dodson’s iconic, stoic figures are writ large, but now are revealed through the twisting and layered complexity of Moerlein’s saplings. Found objects intrude and become part of the form, lending their own character to these giant sentries. A sense of the ancient looms, of figures built for burning in sacred and communal rites. In the blending of two artist’s inspirations, a greater unison is revealed.

Update: Read all about The Myth Makers in this Maynard Grapevine article by Denishe.

Recently installed at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury Massachusetts:

Forest Grace by The Myth Makers: Donna Dodson & Andy Moerlein

If you missed the Boston Sculptors show at Chesterwood this summer... You can still see our piece "Forest Grace" through 2017 on the grounds of the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury.

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Artist Statement

‘My artwork celebrates the mystical relationship between human beings and the animal kingdom. Because there were no icons of women in the church that I grew up in, my vision is to create them. Through hybrid female-animal forms that I sculpt in wood, I flesh out sensuality, sexuality and soul with a well-proportioned figurative vocabulary. The natural grain of the wood interacts with the form and shape of my sculptures in a descriptive way, suggesting nostrils, and nipples or garments and fabric textures. I often stylize each piece to enhance the girl, woman, princess, queen or goddess within. The mouths, or in some cases beaks, are closed symbolizing the mysteries they embody. These figures are sculpted in sizes ranging from the intimate to the monumental. I use color in both subtle and bold ways to activate each piece. My inspiration comes from ancient iconography and mythological imagery.’

About

Donna Dodson has been carving images out of wood for nearly 20 years. Her sculptures explore feminine beauty and evoke humor and playfulness but also grace, power and emotional strength. Her unique vision responds to the relation of animals to the human spirit that have existed since ancient times. Her figures are almost always female and range in size from the intimate to the monumental.

Dodson’s pre-med studies and her passion for Egyptian art led her to study wood and stone sculpture. African sculptures and Native American totems also influence her work.

She uses logs of osage orange wood from her grandfather’s farm in Illinois, and ash, cherry, locust and maple from New England.

Dodson has worked in a series using an elephant headed goddess to explore female figureheads in positions of power. Recently, Dodson created large scale outdoor pieces, engaging in a public dialogue about her work. The site became a more prevalent theme. Today, Dodson has returned to creating statement pieces such as a cardinal goddess for the women of the Catholic Church who aspire to be ordained and Madam President- a monument to the first female president of the USA.

Bio

Donna Dodson is an American sculptor who has exhibited her artwork around the world. Dodson has completed successful residencies in Verbier Switzerland, Cusco Peru, Keelung Taiwan and Ringkoebing Denmark. Donna is currently a Scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center and a Fellow at the St Botolph Club in Boston. Dodson’s recent show, “Sheroes” at the Boston Sculptors Gallery was met with critical acclaim. Donna was a 2022 Fulbright US Scholar at Q21/MuseumsQuartier in Vienna Austria working as an artist in residence with her host institution Tricky Women/Tricky Realities, the world’s only animation festival for women. Dodson has won grants from the Puffin Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire Guild of Woodworkers and the George Sugarman Foundation. Her work is in the permanent collection of the World Chess Hall of Fame in St Louis Missouri, the Provincetown Art Museum, the Art Complex Museum and the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts, The Noyes Art Museum in New Jersey and the Davistown Museum in Maine. Donna's work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Sculpture Magazine, The Daily Beast, Hyperallergic and Artnet. She is currently represented by the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston and Los Angeles. She is a former member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Dodson is a graduate of Wellesley College. Donna is a freelance writer whose articles in newspapers, magazines and blogs demonstrate the economic impact and global reach of the Boston arts sector. Her recent paper, “What do we call courageous women” was presented at the Society for Classical Studies annual meeting in 2022 and was published in Queering the Amazons a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Inspirations

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

-Leonard Cohen

"... I think one's art goes only as far and as deep as [one's] love goes..."

-Andrew Wyeth

"art is valuable because it challenges, inspires, and enables us to see ourselves in much more interesting ways"
-Mickey Cartin

" the thing that I had to do was to ... work super hard in the hope that someday it would pay off. And in using that term I don't mean necessarily money, but just the fact that I would have more depth and dimension both as a human being and as an artist."
-Ed Paschke

“Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”
-Steve Jobs

"...remember that collecting art is an act of love. It isn’t about what you pay for a work, or how rich (or not) you become when you one day sell it, but the depth of your enjoyment in the time you live with it."
-Abigail R. Esman

"[Patronage] is a gift, in the form of money, in exchange for [my] gift, in the form of music."

-Amanda Palmer

"Art is the crucial interface between the imagination and reality, the thing that makes life deeper and broader than what it might be without such insight."

-Todd Levin

"If they hadn't told me I was ugly, I would never have searched for my beauty."

-Gabourey Sidibe

"Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be."

-Clementine Paddleford

Great artists “must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.”

-Humphrey Trevelyan

"Life should be lived so vividly and intensely that thoughts of another life or of a longer life are not necessary."

-Marjory Stoneman Douglas

“When people say that poetry is a luxury, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.” Jeannette Winterson

Artistic Process

When I start a piece of work I need to evoke such a strong feeling about each piece that I can dare to listen to the piece, to make mistakes - to just create. It is the emotional investment in the act of creation that crystallizes the work for me.

Sometimes the idea or concept comes first, and I imagine what the piece will be when completed. More often I work from intuition. Once completed I see the intentions behind the piece, or the desire from which it is born. Artists who inspire me include Jessica Stockholder and Katharina Fritsch. Stockholder uses color as a transformational visual device, changing the way we see form. Fritsch creates sculptures of sacred figures that become pop-icons through her use of color. In the same way I work with various kinds and grains of wood accented by color.

My artwork is about self expression, autobiography, and self redemption. Each sculpture is independent and heroic, but each is connected to the body of my total work. Each is made greater and honored by its association with those that have preceded it, but keeps its own sacred identity. Each reflects my realization that I am a self-made woman.

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Monday, November 2, 2015

November News

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