Ursula von Rydingsvard, by Katina Green

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born in 1942 from a long line of Polish peasant farmers; she and her family lived in Germany where her father was drafted to farm for the Germans during World War II.  After the war, they immigrated to the United States and settled in a small town in Connecticuter and began a very different and new life.  She never learned what an artist was until she came to America, but it seems she was predisposed to be an artist.  After earning her Master of Fine Arts at Columbia, Ursula worked for a while in steel but found it too masculine, saying, “I couldn’t put tenderness or soft sweetness into it.”  One day the artist Michael Mulhearn brought her some cedar, and that was it, she could speak through the cedar charging it with emotional forces in a way she could not with the steel.    

Ursula says, “Sculpture gives a greater sense of reality. That’s a ridiculous word to use, but they have a greater substance. You can grab a sculpture. You can’t grab a painting. There’s something about things that really exist in this world, which seems different to me than ideas that float.”   Her sculptures are personal, many times referring to them in as feminine, calling them “she” or “princess.” Yet she does not see them as female, “I don’t think of them as female figures,” she says. “I just think of them as ‘shes.’”

I find her work visually stunning with the way that she joins human-made and nature.  Most of her works are massive sculptures that resemble things from her heritage such as bowls, tools, and walls from the cabin she lived in.  Her works may be abstract at its core, but they follow a flow of nature in their beauty and grace.  She sees her work as responsive to eastern European peasant traditions, in form, process, and meaning all coming from her background of where she came from.  Although she works primarily in wood and has pushed the limits of this material, she uses wood as well to cast bronze and resin.  She experiments with paper, lead, animal intestines, and other materials both hard and soft as well, she is fascinated with the expressive possibility of materials. 

The first time Ursula combined bronze and cedar is in her piece, Luba.  Just as this piece does most of Ursula’s sculptures retain a sense if human scale, one can see the graceful member flowing down from the main body; Ursula has said that it is intended to resemble the arm of a mother cradling a baby.  This lower portion of the arm is made of bronze with rest being cedar, she has taken graphite and rubbed it into areas the emphasize the shadow and depths of the cirucular saw’s cuts.

For Ursula von Rydingsvard, Making Art Is a Way to Survive

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