and how long have you felt this way?
Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
The Fourth Wall
473 25th St.
Oakland
Closed April 12th
Formed and fired en masse, the small ceramic body parts become figures, creatures previously unknown, only upon assembly. Unplanned, each perhaps creates itself under the gentle handling of artist Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor.
Recently on display at the Fourth Wall Gallery, her wildly emotive and evocative clay figurines are disorienting and delightful, easy to love and very difficult to understand. Every one a hodgepodge of miscellaneous members and string, burned-off fabrics, drips, and glaze-cracks galore, and the off-kilter nature (most stand, or crouch, in unusual contortions) increases the unsettling factor while simultaneously infusing them with a life force and gentle broken need for care.
Audible gasps and exclamations of astonishment—“Astonishing!” crowed one viewer— accompanied near every entrant to the small space. What might by another hand read as upsetting or off-putting O’Connor has successfully distilled instead into deeply compelling and friendly, if still slightly unsettling, beings. Frankensteined monsters, sure, but of the house pet variety, and especially here in the Bay there’s little we love more than an ugly (or um, just disabled) little pet.
A good boy with a chicken foot and face any mother lover could love, no?
Adding to their sweet allure was the color palette. All glazed in gentle, soft-hued earth tones and grays, pinks and blues, often highly muted, the dancers—the gallery attendant and a fellow viewer made an assumption of the artist’s background as a dancer informing the fluidity of the poses, we’d would love to know if that is true—felt faded and prematurely patina-d and comfortable, comforting, like a childhood doll set upon a shelf and rediscovered decades later. Their fairytale features, in the classic sense, mythical, broken, apocalyptic, they somehow retain a hopeful and joyful feeling all the same.
My fellow fictional figure-loving viewers and I peered closer at whichever we favored, or found most disconcerting, often stopping just inches away with eyes and lenses. Their soft eyes and tattered fabrics make them wear their fragility and feelings on their faces and limbs, in their cracks and disconnections; perhaps we all feel this way, we’re just too proud to say so.
