Artist Profile: Phyllis Rosser
Using wood stripped bare of its bark and washed smooth by the Connecticut River in Bellows Falls, Vermont, I construct dynamic sculptures that invite contemplation. In the decaying branches thrown on the shore, especially as they turn silvery gray, I see the weathered barn doors of my childhood farm. The energy of the wood – its muted colors and infinite patterns of grains as well as its broken forms have a power for me, suggesting something that endures even as a tree breaks apart.
I began collecting wood on the beaches near my home many years ago. Finding it’s energy a surrogate for my emotions, I arrange the branches and limbs into bundles of particular feelings. My work represents my struggle for sensuousness by transforming and revaluing a material often considered refuse into an object that is appealing and alive. The wood, honed to its essence, is assembled to create a subtle play of color in shades of rust, hazel, silver and charcoal to display not only the enduring aspect of nature, but the unique beauty which is expressed through its vulnerability to the ravages of time.
I have been constructing wood assemblages for over 25 years, and have exhibited widely in New York and New England. My sculpture is included in the collections of artists, curators and corporations including Microsoft, the Smith College Museum of Art and Johnson & Johnson. New York Times critic Barry Schwabsky compared the intertwining pieces of my work to “the muscular brush strokes of Abstract Expressionist painters like Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning.”
Distant Thunder, 36 x 75 x 11, wood
Mandarin Gate, 62 x 48 x 12, wood
CummuloNimbus, 42 x 89 x 11, wood
Insensible Rock, 45 x 40 x 11, wood
Memory Leaf, 24 x 17 x 6, wood
