Sculpture

At sea

A boat is an animal
turned upside down emptied
of gut muscle suffering
capacious belly open to the sky
releasing itself
into copper wind

I am an animal turned
upside down thoughts rise
where guts should be
habits where instinct was
unmoored at sea this emptiness
turns into a vessel

Art as air

pain
in your shoulders
keeps you from reaching out
crumpled collapsed
bed sheet in disarray
curling chaos of a wave
standing at a window the street
swarming with fists and fear
tangle of skin
tightly-tied rope
translucent curving shell
holding it all

an image
slips inside
silence
in the moment of waking
before you know who you are
before the world

As a visual artist who also writes poetry, I've recently linked the two art forms more intimately, writing poems from my artworks. The different languages shape each other.

My sculptures and installations are grounded in the body and somatic perception, working with human scale, visceral imagery, and sensuous materials such as wood, stone, steel, cloth and especially rawhide, which alludes to life, death, and transformation. Living on an old farm in rural New England, I study the forces of nature to make visible what remains under the surface.

Rosalyn Driscoll is a visual artist whose work, primarily in sculpture and installation, is grounded in the body, sensory experience, and perception. A decade of making and exhibiting tactile/haptic sculpture is documented in her book, The Sensing Body in the Visual Arts: Making and Experiencing Sculpture (Bloomsbury, 2020). She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, and her work has been exhibited in the US, Europe and China. She has been instrumental in developing the Dharma and Art program at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies since 2016.

More on Rosalyn Driscoll’s work can be found on our Links page.