Sojourner, 2023, felt, wood, clay, 9’H x 40″W x 15″D
A child’s hooded jacket hangs on a branch. From both sleeves a cascade of maps of all the continents of the world, fall, and then go up to the opposite end of the branch. A bird perches on the branch, surveying the cascade of maps.
The pieces suggests a freeze frame, of an absent figure, caught and held in stasis, with suggested movement outside the frame—such as migration, now a worldwide phenomenon, propelled by so many reasons, including income inequality, climate change, and natural and human made disasters.
From There On Up to Here and Now, 1995
Commissioned by the High Museum of Art. Exhibited at the Atlanta Central Library, the Smithsonian Museum, and the University of Virginia.
From There on Up to Here and Now was a collaborative installation that Driscoll created with African-American quilters, Mamie Hughley, Pearl Walker, Annie Heard, and Annie Parks with “Equal Rights and Justice,” High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. The piece was created to celebrate the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, 1965, focusing on personal iconography and histories.
This piece was created for the Bard College Studio Arts Faculty exhibition in the fall of 2013.
This series of drawings were generated while in Rome from January 2013 – June 2013, while serving as the Chief Critic for the European Honors program of RISD.
Phantom Limb, 2007
#2 harvested plastic, 14’L x 7’H x 8’W
“It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least to wash his hands of it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
“Phantom Limb”, a new work by Ellen Driscoll with Golnar Adili and Aimee Burg, is a landscape made from hundreds of plastic milk and water cartons harvested from recycling bins and bags. At its heart is an abandoned North Sea oil rig which houses a McMansion, a surveillance tower, and other architectures of power and consumption attached to it like mollusks to a rock. From the main platform of the oil rig, a dredging crane pulls up an empty load from the ocean below, the underside of which is encrusted with a small colony of shot gun houses. Using the translucent plastic as a medium signifying ghostly presence, fluidity, and transformation, “Phantom Limb” speaks to the complexity of relationships engendered by simple acts of consumption and waste–the clean milk or water, that comes in a plastic bottle, that ends up as waste on a street, then on a garbage barge, plying the waters for a developing world site ready for a cash exchange. It is there, that we find ourselves “sitting upon another man’s shoulders”.
