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Anne Mudge at David Zapf - San Diego - Brief Article
Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Leah Ollman
The formal ingenuity of Anne Mudge's sculpture feels so familiar that it's tempting to give the credit to nature, rather than the artist. Mudge's work, derived from patterns and variations in organic forms--pods, webs, seeds and roots, especially--feels akin to Minimalist sculpture in its rigorous purity. But hers is an earthily sensual Minimalism with a genealogy that can be traced back to Karl Blossfeldt and Eva Hesse, a spare essentialism that engages both body and mind.
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The relationship between whole and constituent parts has been primary to Mudge for many years, and her recent "TapRoots" series, which formed the bulk of this stunning show, hinges on it. A single length of stainless steel rope serves as both conceptual and physical spine of each of the dozen hanging sculptures. Mudge uncoils, twists, divides and subdivides the steel, sending the separated strands out from their source to shape new constellations and enclosures, to articulate new paths. Often they return, like veins to a main artery after pumping vital energy to the further reaches of the body. In one of the "TapRoots" pieces, wire billows out from the vertical spine in a few bursts, bulbous and diaphanous as jellyfish. In another, the central steel rope curves in a sinuous "S," thick tendrils of wire connecting one section to another like ribs. These intricately worked structures retain their integrity on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels; each sculpture could read equally as a mapping of a celestial phenomenon or a network of cells.
On this scale--4 to 6 feet high--these works retain a delicacy and a sensual shimmer, their silver wire glistening like the spidery reflection of sunlight on water. Over the next few years, a group of them will be scaled up for placement in a new underground trolley station near San Diego State University. A full-size version of one sculpture, its central cable as thick around as two fingers and measuring 18 feet when fully extended, hung dramatically at the far end of the gallery. Suspended from its middle, it formed a giant hump, with one end of the cable draping to the ground like the tail of a languid beast, and the other fraying into a frizzy growth of wires, spreading downward like roots. When sited in an underground space, the sculptures will certainly read as subterranean plant forms, but not exclusively. They have such a primal presence that they conjure multiple associations--umbilical cords, curving vertebrae, fossils, sea life and more.
The soulful beauty of the "TapRoots" work was offset here by another group of hanging and wall-mounted sculptures, far quirkier. Made in a wide range of materials--fiber, wire, seeds, glass, resin, copper, plastic--these odd and wonderful anomalies, many of them small enough to be cradled in one hand, evoke conditions, gestures, liberations, blips. One brings to mind a dandelion tenuously clinging to the wall, its stem slim and fine, its spores gummed with waxy asphaltum. Another, made of an inside-out bicycle tire, twisted and braided with black silk, is both comical and a bit creepy. These little freaks of nature are endearing, curious, and like all of Mudge's work, exquisitely crafted. They signal a new sense of abandon in her sculpture, a playfulness distilled less from nature this time than from experience.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
