but its written in stone,

said the woman

to the sand.  

Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, Poet

The landscape isn’t my inspiration. It’s my mentor. As I look out of my studio window everyday, multiple worlds flow by such as snow fiercely blowing sideways creating a white opaque curtain, and the sun can shine so brightly that every object in my view seems to shimmer, and the darkness becomes a silent black velvet of infinite depth. The only constant is change in this view. There is no emotion, no preference. Is it personal that the snow slides down the mountain bending and breaking the trees in its path? My senses are on high alert to witness such cause and effect. We live in a three-dimensional world and making three-dimensional art is a direct response to these phenomena for me.

My work comes out of and is wrought from the earth.  These sculptures are of this time and place yet steeped in the sediment of history.  This sense of place in my work, firmly rooted but also fluid and transient, resonates with a multitude of ideas.  Illusions of stability and instability, safety and danger, stasis and catalyst and above all, transformation, all come into play.  Like the contours of the natural landscape, that in the shifting light of dawn or dusk seem to take on... dissolve into or morph into primal forms, so do the latent metaphors elicited by the materials of my sculptures.  Their abstract imagery dissolves and coalesces into an ancient trail marker, a samovar or anthropomorphic forms.  We enter into the landscape environments and discover that our assumptions of what we think we see or know, are tenuous, or fleeting, or not at all what they seem.

Writer Arlene Raven- Exhibition Catalogue Essay:

When the German poet Rilke tells us to leave our houses and enter the enormous space outside, surely what he means is to follow the asterisk to the bottom of the page, to drop to our knees in algae, push hands into the fringed and seepy edges into which pieces of our lives have sunk, places where year after year the crust grows thin, too thin, finally, to mask the sense that underneath this unkempt border something else is breathing: the origins of our words, wiser afterthoughts, the whispered asides of the spirit. Barbra Hurd, “Stirring the Mud”, pg.3

Nancy Lovendahl’s art has extraordinary beauty of surface and structure.

Yet the classical appearance of her sculpture

contains a disorderly psychological undercurrent.

An artist working in Colorado

with its high mountains, big skies, and clear horizons,

she has taken a vast surrounding nature and brought it within.

These convolution and involutions

are not achieved without this artist’s entering

the discomforting territory of the living,

where organisms, by virtue of their eternal changeability,

make all borders waver.

Lovendahl works on single efforts

and, conceptually, with groups of sculptures.

But the most important element in her creative procedure is

the idea that precedes all material process.

“To me”, she says, the egg “spawns all - 

rebirth, resurrection and renewal.”

The strength of this conceit is countered by the fragility of her means.

In The Sheik and The Rabbi (2002), her medium - paper – is fragmentary.

Lovendahl’s paper is, however, cast,

a transformation of materials

in which all wayward parts can become whole.

Duality (2004), made of clay, stainless steel and sterling silver,

imagines particular juxtapositions of the kind that occupy Lovendahl –

of inner and outer, defenselessness and protection,

the connections between ancient and contemporary,

and of artist and art.

Eggs themselves are replete in contrary meaning.

Constantin Brancusi considered the form perfect, universal and sacred.

The ceramics of Prana III (2004) are tranquil, delicate and (literally) poised.

But they can also crack and break.

These properties have historical and political implications for Lovendahl

(as they did for twentieth-century Surrealists

like Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo).

The egg evokes spiritual and emotional metaphors

of germination and replenishment

in such iconic works as Typhonic (2004) and Woman Man Blue (2005).

There is, above all, in Lovendahl’s most recent efforts, 

a crystalline meta-meaning – metamorphosis itself.

The ever-evolving oval

Was a lifelong mainstay 

for Willem de Kooning, Joan Miro and Jean Arp.

As references to representation, the formalisms of these mid-century artists

might call to mind still-life objects, housing or heads; eyes, breasts and bulbs

as conventions of their times.

As part of the same legacy – its innovative abstractions –

forms may be pure; simply form.

In Lovendahl’s “Geode” series, concrete reproduction

melds with its nonobjective underside.

Lovendahl uses the ovoid

that has inhabited medieval canvases of madonnas and children,

underlay Renaissance murals of last suppers,

and driven spherical architectures of the Baroque pointing toward heaven,

to make an artistic statement as primordial as it is of the present,

and as personal as it is essential.

Trees, like eggs, can mean both life and death,

depending on their health and state of being.

The title Tree of Life (2006)

utilizes the contrary nature 

of another natural form with extensive biblical references.

Or consider the pre-biblical “Gaia” trinity (2005),

which is both a presentation of generation and a grave marker.

In the Garden of Eden, planted “out of the ground”,

the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

were two poles at a spiritual center.

The Fall, a Lovendahl title in the “Egg Series”  of 2000,

is also cataloged in Genesis, when Adam ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Biblical morality, in a broad sense,

plays a strong role in Lovendahl’s art.

Judgment and self-recrimination may be swift and absolute,

but humankind is always viewed here as complicated –

equally as frangible as we are bellicose.

The Old Testament as a mirror of the New Testament

is doubly complex,

and the two are co-examples of a revolution in historical time.

Further, even, of the intersection of existence and demise

through restoration and resurrection.

It is legend that after Adam’s death,

Archangel Michael instructed Eve

to plant a branch of the Tree of Knowledge on his grave.

This very branch grew to become the tree

that King Solomon took to the Temple garden.

Discarded and restored, its trunk became

the Cross on which Jesus was crucified.

Arlene Raven, PhD., New York; mentor, feminist, arts advocate, art writer and historian, critic

2006