Ursula von Rydingsvard, Czara z Bąbelkami, 2006

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VON RYDINGSVARD: Something that I have to have in mind when I start a piece is an image that I have in my head. And I think one of the things that I had in my mind, is a sweater that I used to wear as a little girl, that had little circular knobbies that were hanging off the surface of that sweater. Somehow, it influenced that image, because of the comfort I might’ve felt in that sweater.

I’m Ursula von Rydingsvard, and I’m a sculptor.

The surfaces of my sculpture, the textures that I put on my sculpture, that that is a huge part of what makes it work for me.

I think the scale of my work is extraordinarily important. It can have a great deal of complexity. It can have a great deal of energy. And it envelops the human, because it’s tall and it’s wide and it makes you pay attention. Somehow when you can embrace the body, you can also embrace the psyche more effectively.

I think it’s extremely important for me to be working with my body, for me to be working with my hands. I do come from a long line of Polish peasant farmers. I still have this yearning, this opening, this hole in my mind that needs to be filled by what my ancestors did, basically for thousands of years. They’re still running in my blood.

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NARRATOR:

We’re standing before Ursula von Rydingsvard’s work Czara z Bąbelkami from 2006. This monumental abstract sculpture—nearly 17 feet tall, ten-and-a-half feet wide at the top, and six feet deep—is carved from cedar wood. The word “czara” in the title is Polish for goblet, and the shape of this sculpture resembles the bell of a goblet, curving up wider and wider the higher it rises, with a blunt edge across the top. Besides its overwhelming size, what is most immediately striking is the rough texture of its surface, which is pocked and knobby. The knobs bulge out like barnacles in long, irregular columns from top to bottom. No two knobs are alike, nor is the carved space between these bulges the same at any point. The cedar that the artist used to make this piece began as long narrow beams, which were individually cut with handsaws, then glued and stacked together. The square sides of those beams are still evident in a grid-like pattern of seams, emphasizing the underlying geometry beneath the roughly textured surface.

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