Ellen Driscoll is an American artist, who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Tivoli, NY. Her work includes drawing, sculpture, and public art.
Early life and education
Ellen Driscoll was born in Boston in 1953. She studied at Wesleyan University where she received a B.F.A in 1974. She obtained her M.F.A in sculpture from Columbia University in 1980. She was a professor of sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design for 21 years, and was a visiting professor at Bard College in 2018.
Career
Her work is a search for finding connections through materials, between entities that appear to be unrelated on the surface. She has worked on a wide range of topics, including environmental, cultural, and sociopolitical themes.
Style
Her work encompasses drawing, sculpture and public art. Some of her early sculptures, such as The Loophole of Retreat at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris and Passionate Attitudes at Threadwaxing Space, New York, were primarily mixed media and found objects. During her residency at the MacDowell Colony in 2007, Ellen Driscoll made a commitment to work solely with re-purposed and found materials. She was working at the time in collaboration with Golnar Adili and Aimee Burg, on an installation at Wave Hill for "Thoreau Reconsidered". The art connected the ideas of the philosophers' self-reliance, egalitarianism, and respect, with the collection, cleaning, and fabricating of sculpture with materials removed from the waste stream. She started to retrieve plastic bottles directly from the streets to create artwork such as Phantom Limb, FastForwardFossil Part 2, and Still Life.
Themes
Her current work are labor intensive sculptural landscapes criticizing the oil industry and over consumption. She is a member of the collective Project Vortex, which aims to educate the general public about the impact of plastics and plastic pollution.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions, among them, Fastforwardfossil Part 2 at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY in 2009, Fastforwardfossil part 3 at the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen in Ireland in 2010, and “Venti Trasversali ” at the Museo di Storia Naturale dell’ Accademia dei Fisiocritici in Siena, Italy, in 2016.
Public collections
The Loophole of Retreat was commissioned in 1991 for the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris. Her first major public art commission from the MTA's Percent for Art program is As Above, So Below at the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The glass, bronze, and mosaic work is an homage to the famous ceiling of Grand Central Terminal's main concourse, and depicts the night sky over 5 continents. Tales and myths from different civilizations about the origin of the world, and the movements of the stars and heavens, are depicting within each representation of the continents. As Above, So Below is a reminder that ancient stories about the stars, can in fact mirror our earthly daily routines. Her work is in the following museum and public collections:
