Ruth Sack
Pegasus 06
Ruth Sack
Art runs in my lineage. My mother’s mother was a fashion designer in Poland.
She never worked from patterns. Like her, I never followed construction rules.
As a young child I would use whatever materials were around, drawing on
rocks not on paper, in middle school fabricating colorful dimensional forms
made from cast Barbie heads and plastic turn tables. My favorite things were
never flat, so it made sense to become a sculpture major in graduate school
using wire caging and ripped nylon among other materials, combining the
conventional with unconventional.
My early work was based on physical trauma, being a breast cancer survivor.
Feeling hollowed out led to the development of visceral forms that when
coiled from the inside, allowed beautiful structures to emerge, creating their
own space and negating their own conventions. They reference letterforms
such as cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and calligraphies. They are zigs and zags like
x and Y-chromosomes, living organisms that together grow into a community of
clustered shapes. (See Zigs and Zags”) Their proportions are body-like which
occurs in lettering as a rule of thirds, like the letter E. Eventually these pieces
grew larger as bridge like-constructions, testing the barriers of their placement
(See “Stride”).
My current work consists of anthropomorphic sculptures that I call
“Phantasms.” These pieces are built mostly of wax. Rolled layers of encaustic
colors, originally inspired by particular memories, are sliced and applied as a
colorful skin. At first these pieces were intended as a diversion from the
sadness of the pandemic. Now I am making the sculptures and reliefs bigger
and brighter as our post pandemic world is opening up.
I am drawn to painting with encaustic for its versatility. It has magical abilities;
being translucent, activated by heat, it can be cast, and can adhere to any
surface while being able to embed things into it. It’s a very process-driven
medium, like cooking but better. Color is a driving force behind my work.
Bright colors require different kinds of evocative thought. Fluorescents pop
and illuminate light, enlivening the forms. I am pushing the limits of the
materials I use to give an identity to my constructions. They describe different
sensibilities and are a new context for our visual arena of language.