Ellen Driscoll's Passages

Art in America, June, 2000 by Janet Koplos

The patterns in the Persephone surround are sand-cast glass. Other tiles are etched on the surface and painted with permanent glass pigments. However, glass is not the only material in Driscoll's mosaics. Celtic patterns enclosing a mosaic depiction of a Celtic sun-wheel are bronze casts. Two representations of Sisyphus pushing celestial diagrams include stone mosaics as well as glass. Thus the surfaces of all the works offer a rich variety of experiences to the fingertips. They are made with the expectation that they will be touched, and the range of tactile sensation they provide, in addition to their visual interest, is certainly one of the strengths of this work.

Driscoll, a professor of sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, is known for making works based on elaborate underlying programs. In 1995 she produced at SoHo's Thread Waxing Space an installation of mechanized sculptures inspired by the 19th-century medical conception of hysteria, a work that the critic Nancy Princenthal called "nearly omnivorous in its intellectual appetite." A few years before that she had created a walk-in camera obscura to visualize the experience of a slave who spent seven years in hiding in a tiny attic. More recently she conceived and orchestrated a collaborative work of puppetry, dance and theater centered on Ahab's wife, an almost nonexistent character in Moby Dick, which was presented at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island. The complex representations in Driscoll's Grand Central Terminal mosaics show the broad meanings that satisfy the artist happily embedded in visual and tactile forms that can reach a fast-moving viewer.