Ursula von Rydingsvard's Sculptures at the Bruce Museum

Ursula von Rydingsvard: states of becoming is the first exhibition to explore the artist’s improvisational manner of working and long-standing practice of returning to sculptures or deliberately reworking years later. Since 2007 she has expanded her sculptural vocabulary, collaborating with the papermaking workshop Dieu Donné to produce highly dimensional pieces cast from abaca and handmade linen paper embellished with cotton, lace, and other organic materials. Like her sculptures, the works on paper embody a certain vulnerability and elusiveness, the amorphous, wet pulp fraying at the edges. Tracing von Rydingsvard’s works of the last two decades in cedar and paper through various states of evolving, unraveling, and, ultimately, becoming, this exhibition reveals the tensions between methodology and intuition, monumentality and vulnerability, and meaning and ambiguity in her practice.