URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: My work is so labor intensive that often
I'm doing things that are highly repetitive
in order to get to the end of the piece or of the project.
It's actually pretty easy to have an image,
but to realize it is a deep deal.
Often when you're in the process of realizing an image,
it's going somewhere else.
If that tangent starts going off in a place that feels more exciting,
that's what I go with.
I grew up as one of seven children
in the post-World War II refugee camps for Polish people in Germany.
My parents were extraordinary survivors,
and my home was one in which words were not used very often,
and in fact anybody that used too many words was automatically suspect.
I drank from the world through visual means.
That was a huge source of the information by which I lived.
I learned you smile but you ration that.
You laugh, but not very frequently,
and really at appropriate times.
And that working hard was the answer to life.
I almost think of it as the way that the Shakers might live.
We stayed in wooden barracks,
raw wooden floors, raw wooden walls
and raw wooden ceilings so
somewhere in my blood I'm dipping into that source.
I build everything out of cedar.
Very neutral. Almost like a piece of paper.
When we build the sculpture, we build it layer by layer.
I draw the outside lines of each of the pieces that you see here.
The cutters cut them.
We put them back here.
We then mark it precisely.
On the outside--you see some of these marks on the outside?
And on the inside, on the top portions these marks
are actually the most precise of all
so that if any one of these pieces were to be tossed or to be lost,
we could find them and put them back where they belong.
We build it and screw it all together.
And then we take it off layer by layer by layer
in order to glue it layer by layer.
The cutters by the way are the princes of my studio.
There are cutters who cut lyrically,
there are cutters who cut very aggressively,
and depending on what I need, that's who I use.
In order to make an organic form you need to have many, many straight cuts.
The surface is a kind of landscape that I get carried away with.
My definition of a landscape that could also have to do with
the kind of psychological landscape or an emotional landscape.
Graphite is a very, very fine powder and because it's so fine,
it's able to get into the pores of the cedar.
I really put it on in a very hefty way so that
I really grind it with a brush into the surface.
And then we scoured the surface to further define
what I wanted the surface to do
because that surface is extremely important to me
in terms of communicating emotionally.
I never do a model–
I never do drawings for my works–
because they close me in.
Because they limit my options.
You can't get too predictable.
You have to have surprises all over the place.
If for nothing else, then just to keep my head going–
keep my mind alive.
But I think to have any level of interest
you have to have some sort of combat, you know,
that's occurring within the work.
And anger has been a tremendous mobilizing force for me.
I'm grateful to my anger.
The confrontation in part lies with my struggle with the cedar.
It's always telling me what it needs to do
and I think that I'm trying to tell it what I want it to do.
This is a sculpture that I want to look as though it's ravaged.
As though it's been kind of beaten up by life.
Anything that has to do with chaos is as interesting if not more so than order.
This is a machine that's meant only for metal to grind on top of wood
and what it does is it burns its surface.
For me, that's what gives it a whole other landscape and a whole other depth.
Mine are definitely not utilitarian objects
but I learned from that which is vernacular.
I consider these my drawings.
They are three-dimensional but they're actually quite complicated
in terms of all of the markings on their surface.
This is chalk and that's graphite.
It's made out of wood--out of cedar, obviously–
but it's still lace because it wanders in a way that's very wayward
and it's very open.
You can see through it.
I deliberately, consciously,
set out to make it feel and look light.
I love the man-made and nature kind of really becoming fused or becoming one.
For the project at Madison Square Park,
the urethane bonnet, I wanted a transparent look–
a look of walls that the light went through.
I wanted a very agitated surface and the hood that is over the bonnet is almost like a little porch.
It's very erratic and it's very celebratory
and it needed that translucency of the light.
I think there were twelve marriages that took place inside the bonnet.
Certainly that part of the piece was a big success.
I do have books that I've written in.
I use this as a way to talk to myself
and I write down my dreams,
documenting them is one of the things that makes me feel lighter.
I draw because it's something that I like to do from time to time.
I've never shown my drawings–
I'm very shy about my drawings.
They really are mine.
I can't help but think right now that
maybe the best drawings are the ones that I leave for a while.
Let it gestate because as time goes by
I think it becomes more and more obvious.
This particular drawing I've worked on for I think over a year.
It's almost like a patchwork quilt you know?
And I think of these things not really as sewing,
maybe as cuts that the surgeon then sews later.
I think of them as a kind of landscape that you look at from the top.
This piece is the most baroque piece that I've done in my life.
It's also the kind of landscape you find on a human body.
The interiors of these pouches had a tremendous amount to do with
defining what the exterior does.
I want people to enjoy the voluptuousness of the piece.
I want the piece to walk with them.
I feel that anchoring these structures and anchoring these forms
is a part of the power behind how it speaks.
Gravity serves an incredibly important purpose for me.
This wall pocket has a flat, flat back
because it actually can edge up against a wall.
There's kind of a humbleness to it.
There's almost an introverted feel that it has.
I need the inside to be as carefully considered as the outside.
And I have this idea of almost like something that would–
you know, almost like something that a body could excavate from.
You know, could sort of be molded with and then escape from.
My whole cedar studio is loaded with pieces that are unfinished
and I need all of those things in my environment to feed me,
to give me always options.
Nothing can exist in my head without opposites.
The opposites don't have to be complete opposites,
but they can be things that don't ordinarily belong together.
Within a piece that has tremendous amount of agitation and agony,
there can also be something very hushed
and very quiet and very lyrical and very humane–
also within the context of something that feels as though it's full of violence.
That within it one can have something that feels humble
and that feels as though it's capable of giving you a "głaskać po głowie" –
the capacity of petting you on the head in a most gentle sort of way.