Nasher Public: Linda Ridgway
Nasher Sculpture Center
August 19 – September 12, 2021
Linda Ridgway’s attentiveness to the rhythms of nature and its echoes in poetry has sustained more than three decades of involvement in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. For her Nasher Public installation, she has brought together five works to form a meditation on time, memory, and touch, drawn from her experiences over the months of the pandemic and its aftermath.
The central piece Herself offers as a centerpiece a dress that Ridgway inked to run through a press at Flatbed Press in Austin: meant only to produce prints, the dress itself becomes a kind of artifact of Ridgway’s creative process. She has surrounded the dress with objects related to her life, her family and friends, and her ongoing interests. The image of a clock, for example, resembles one owned by her parents, while the inclusion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a beloved text of Ridgway’s, points to the source of the work’s title. Ridgway acknowledges that the dress’s presentation, surrounded by objects significant to her, suggests an element of the funerary; this theme is echoed in the burnt roses of The Uses of Sorrow, which concerns her father’s death some years before.