Review of Exhibition
Garrison Art Center, Garrison NY
August 14 to September 6, 2009

The ceramic work of Judy Sigunick at the Garrison Art Center is a suspended world populated by cylindrical women draped in patterned cloth, milky-white elephants, and androgynous waifs. All characters in an idiosyncratic epic, it is unclear which are the heroes or heroines in her stories. Perhaps that is just how Sigunick prefers that her forms add up, allowing the viewer to experience the fate of the figures as simultaneously displaced and powerful, splendid and melancholic.

Elephants roam gracefully through the artist’s exhibition. A solitary elephant, either dying or resting, is achingly vulnerable. In Sigunick’s Standing Elephant, 2004, the creature’s trunk idles down to meet the ground, becoming a fifth limb and transforming the space under its belly into a clearing in a forest. These elephants are both projections of the waifs’ needs for companionship, protection, and transport as well as formal meditations on volume and surface. The elephants are loyal and trusting conveyances for costumed girls on their odysseys; their mystical presence is a gift bestowed.

Sigunick’s forms are quirky and imprecise. They are not careless; they are the decisive acts of an artist confident in how forms shift to build narrative and visual purpose. A red fluted skirt lie casually across the lap of a slender figure like a hooped saddle blanket in Rider With Red Skirt, 2009.  A wheel-thrown vessel turns into a woman who is both gesturing impassionedly and standing pillar-like in Girl of Found Treasure With Red Stripes, 2007.  The playfulness of form and shape is matched by dense layers of texture, incised, painted, and fired onto the surface of the clay. Like an archeologist working in reverse, Sigunick discovers contours around glossy pools and grainy shadows. Whether they are artifacts from the kiln’s fire or the artist’s hand, she articulates the details of her epic stories through these textures.

A narrative of a displaced voyage manifests between the sculptures in the gallery. The girls meander on their ashy pachyderms around draped women, immobile and solid as columns. Sigunick’s women have bound hands and concerned looks. The procession is palpably still, but internally the distance traveled is significant. The physicality of the clay forms is as compelling as the drama of the players in Sigunick’s stories. Despite the fragility of both, the urge to build stabile structures or to pursue the resolution of a pilgrimage endures.

Laura Kaufman

August, 2009