Elise Siegel

Beginning in 1991, Siegel took a more sociopolitical direction, employing feminist critique and psychological investigation in sculptures that resembled female-gendered clothing and referenced the body metaphorically through its absence.[18][27][4][6] This work developed formally and materially out of her abstract sculpture and was widely shown in the first half of the decade, in group exhibitions—at the Neuberger Museum ("Empty Dress," 1993) and Museum at FIT ("Fashion Is a Verb," 1995), among others—and a solo show, "Second Skin" (College of Charleston, 1993).[18][20] Siegel animated the garments (skirts, dresses, pinafores, corsets, bras and tutus) with wires that suggested hair, creating movement and allowing her to draw in space. Their patched and cracked, pigmented surfaces evoked skin, while straps and stitched wire seams suggested bandages and psychological/cultural constriction.[18][3][4] Curator and writer Nina Felshin identified these works as "concrete aesthetic parallels" to contemporary cultural theory, which revealed the role of clothing in definitions and transformations of female identity by, in essence, turning social construction "inside out so the stitching shows."[18]

In her "Portrait" series, Siegel created a series of bra forms in response to the Dow Corning breast implant crisis of 1992.[18] It included Portrait #6 (1992), a corset and tutu doubling as a female torso that drew a connection between foundational garments that "mold and shape" and bodies altered by cutting into flesh.[3][6][28] The sculpture's rough, tangled construction equated garment straps—both intimate and strangling—with medical bandages, while its frayed, faded edges and Frankensteinian wire stitching evoked struggle and damage, conveying a sense of horror regarding the movement to surgery as reinvention, which wounded as much as enhanced women.[6][3][28] In another series, Siegel explored apron forms, employing webs of wire that simultaneously read as (pubic) hair and skirt (e.g., Hairskirt, 1993), alluding to the garment's original function as a protection against the "polluting" power of genitalia.[18][29]

Elise Siegel, Into the room of dream/dread, I abrupt awake clapping, eight life-size ceramic figures on wooden chairs, overall dimensions variable, 2001, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

In the mid-1990s, Siegel returned to clay, looking for a more immediate, tactile material from which to create directly figurative work.[4][9] She initially produced fragments—ghostly heads, tightly clasped hands, dangling arms—before turning to installations of life-size, hollow doll or puppet-like figures, that Eleanor Heartney described as "psychologically complex tableaux of children of curiously ambiguous sexuality."[30][31][9] Village Voice critic Robert Shuster wrote that these works derived an uncanny, foreboding power from what he called "Siegel's process of golem-like creation," a schematic form of modeling that foregrounded a sutured together look with rotating parts and misalignments.[13][14] She hand-built the figures whole out of clay coils, cut them into parts to fit into the kiln, then reassembled them, leaving visible seams along shoulders, wrists and waists, with heads sometimes resting at awkward angles.[13]

Siegel's installations combined carefully arranged stagecraft and a precise sense of gesture and choreography to create ambiguous scenes with the uncanny quality of dreams.[13][12] Her first, Into the room of dream/dread, I abrupt awake clapping (2001), was installed in a heavily curtained, dimmed gallery, and consisted of seven seated children arrayed in a loose circle around another child, in an uncertain place of honor or reproach.[12][32] The figures were colored a dull, even gray and modeled in doughy fashion, with simple, punched-in eyes, detailed extremities, and separately fired heads set on small wedges so they could be rotated to fix the gazes.[12] Seated upright with tense dangling feet and hands in front of their chests arrested in the act of clapping—excepting the central child—the children tilted their heads inquisitively toward the gallery entrance, mouths slightly ajar in silence.[12][32] Reviewers noted the eerie reversal of focus—which made viewers the center of attention, as if they had interrupted a conversation or game at a moment of expectancy or dread—as an effective means of evoking a sense of repression and anxiety associated with childhood.[12][4][2]

Elise Siegel, Twenty-four Feet, twelve slightly smaller than adult-size figures, ceramic, aqua resin, fabric, wooden stands, overall dimensions variable, 2004, Garth Clark Project Space, Long Island City, NY.

Three subsequent installations employed children’s bodies divided into upper and lower halves, which Sculpture critic Edward Rubin wrote, projected "a chillingly real psychic turbulence."[19][33] In Twenty-four Feet (2004), Siegel placed two neat rows of girls—lower bodies only—seated on facing chairs without seat bottoms, exposing them from below.[2][4][33] The lower torsos were open at the waist and hollow, intensifying a sense of vulnerability already created by the open seat bottoms.[2][4] The figures were arranged so that their playfully rendered stockinged feet nearly touched; Art in America's Nancy Princenthal wrote, "flexed and pointed, toes curled and spread, they communicate with uninhibited eloquence" an innocence so potent that it plunged viewers "into a total immersion in childhood."[2]

Diametrically opposite in tone, Twenty-one Torsos (2004) depicted twenty-one upper bodies in pairs or groups of three with arms and fists waving (but never quite touching), each perched on a rolling metal stand.[2][4] Siegel modeled the figures with boyish cropped hair, tight sleeveless t-shirts, and vague, somewhat helpless expressions of uncertainty that belied an aggressive scene Princenthal called "an unstable cloud of silent strife."[2][4] In I am what is around me (2007), Siegel created a similar grouping of unsmiling, nearly identical boys—upper halves, mounted on black stands—that seemed to enact a cultish playground ritual or game; in his review, Robert Shuster noted one boy who comes forward to present beseeching, blackened hands, implicating the viewer as a possible intruder or corrupter.[13]

In the 2010s, Siegel has concentrated on hand-built ceramic busts that explore human interiority.[34][11][35] This work draws on historical empowered objects, such as the Jōmon period Dogū and Haniwa funeral figures of prehistoric and third-to-sixth-century Japan, respectively, European iron helmets, Renaissance reliquary busts, idols and African masks.[36][37][1] The life-sized to 24"-inch sculptures—presented on pedestals or plinths—are not portraits of specific people, but works created from memory and imagination.[1][5] Reviews describe the heads as anonymous and universal—suggestive but indeterminate in terms of race and gender, and mutable in registering fleeting passages of disquiet, unease or indecision.[9][1][34][38] Their fleshy features range in modeling from naturalistic to lumpy and crude, with glazing that shifts from subtly layered patina-like surfaces to provisional and raw; most are fired in two pieces, leaving a visible crack at the base of the neck.[1][5][36]

Critics such as Nina Felshin and Ann Landi suggest that these features translate into emotional vulnerability and warmth and stimulate personal projection by viewers, a key to Siegel’s work.[34][1] Romanov Grave described her attention to the subtleties of expression, modeling and surface application as a vocabulary evoking "the injuries of the world as worn by the body … articulating the pathos, horror and eros of daily human experience."[36] In his review in Hyperallergic of Siegel's exhibition "Rough Edges" (2019, Studio 10), Stephen Maine commented on the faces' complex, equivocal emotions—for example, hovering between stoicism and disappointment (in Pale Blue Portrait Bust with Dark Drips, 2018) or incomprehension and muted chagrin (Portrait Bust with Amber Shirt and Lavender Hair, 2016): "the viewer is struck by these multifaceted yet understated attitudes and shaded emotional states because they are embodied in the work through such direct, primal means. We appreciate the fine-tuning wrought upon these clumps of mud even as we let ourselves be taken in by it."[5]