An exhibition of drawing, photography and sculpture by this American artist.

Ellen Driscoll’s recent studio practice continues an investigation in sculpture and drawing of the architecture and landscapes that result from natural resource harvesting and consumption. The drawings were made at Sirius Art Centre, Cobh after she was given access to the oil refinery at Whitegate, near Cork. The worlds in the drawings are drained of colour, and yet filled with the flux, fluid, and spillage of a chaotic, dystopic future. In one drawing a lone devil’s poker grows in the dense industrial infrastructure. In another, a shrunken abandoned mansion nests inside a structure used to oversee the loading of oil onto the barges that sail out from the refinery.

The sculptural landscapes are direct responses to the drawings. Made from thousands of plastic milk and water bottles harvested from the recycling bags of urban streets, the landscapes employ the translucent plastic as a signifier for ghostliness, fluidity, and transformation. Using the fact that the plastic bottles once contained our purest drinks, milk and water, as a departure point, the landscapes extend themselves from the intimate local daily act of quenching thirst to the unseen counterweight on the other side of the world: the oil rigs of the North Sea, the North Pacific subtropical gyre, the rogue fire on the Nigerian pipeline, the Himalayas of discarded e-waste in Asia.

Ellen Driscoll is a Professor of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. Her work includes installations such as “The Loophole of Retreat” (Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, 1991), and “Passionate Attitudes” (Threadwaxing Space, New York, 1995), public art projects such as “As Above, So Below” for Grand Central Terminal (1999), a suite of 20 mosaic and glass works for the tunnels at 45th,47th and 48th streets, “Catching the Drift”, a women’s restroom for the Smith College Museum of Art (2003), and “Aqueous Humour”, a kinetic sculpture for the South Boston Maritime Park (2004). Ms. Driscoll has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Anonymous Was a Woman, the LEF Foundation,and Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. Her work is included in major public and private collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art.