Nancy Legge: Personae at Seager Gray Gallery

PERSON AE

N ancy Legge

Nancy Legge: Personae

Stones of Callanish, Isles of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Nancy Legge: Personae Exhibition: August 1 - August 30 Reception for the Artist: Saturday, August 8, 5:30 - 7:30 pm Front Cover: Mari (Hebrew, Seastar), 2014, 6 x 3 x 1 in, porcelain, detail Back Cover: Isamu (Japanese, Bravery), 2015, 13 x 3 x 2.25 in, raku-fired porcelain, fabric, fused glass, found iron Essay Š 2015 Donna Seager Photo Credit: Nancy Legge Photos: Charles Kennard Stones of Callanish Photograph: Margie Adam, 2005 Catalog Design: Donna Seager, Seager Gray Gallery Direct all inquiries to: Seager Gray Gallery 108 Throckmorton Ave. Mill Valley, CA 94941 All rights reserved.

I. Stones are like people. Some are more alive than others.

- ISAMU NOGUCHI

The Stones of Callanish have stood in broad circles facing a central 15 foot stone for 5,000 years on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland . . . ancient, proud and enduring.

Artist Nancy Legge first encountered the stones some 33 years ago and the impact was immediate and visceral. She saw the monoliths as elusively figurative and they became the primary inspiration for her ongoing series of widely collected clay and bronze sculpture. Her navigations in the space between figuration and abstraction have yielded a body of work characterized by mystery, power and grace.

Interestingly, Legge’s medium – clay, dates back even further than her inspiration. As early as 24,000 BC, animal and human figurines were made from clay and other materials and then fired in kilns partially dug into the ground. Legge’s figures look like they would be at home in such ancient environs. They appear to have risen up from the primordial soup or willed themselves into being out of the pliant clay fashioned by the artist’s hands.

Sphinx-like, Legge’s characters, these “personae” are shrouded in mystery, but do not give up their secrets easily. Who are they?

Where did they come from? What have they endured? At the very least, they have endured the fire and extreme heat that all porcelain, raku, bronze and glass forms experience as part of their coming into being. The bodies are elongated, suggesting craggy rock formations as much as the human form. Legge elaborates her dialogue with abstraction by including scant suggestions of a head and omitting the figures’ extremities. The works have names like Cade, Celtic for “battle”, Eda, Norse for “noble” and Tara, Gaelic for “rocky hill.”

II. I have been studying the art of the Far East, in which ambiguity plays a very important part. I’ve noticed that, if one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination. He is compelled to participate in the creative act, which I consider very important.

- ANTONI TAPIES

Legge’s fragmented and totemic sculptures take full advantage of the paradoxical quality of clay such as its humble relationship to the earth, its mutability and its durable yet fragile fired state. In her focused interaction with her materials, she has arrived at that stripped down stark impact that struck her when seeing those monolithic stones so many years before. What remains are the most primal aspects of the human condition – growth and decay, fragility and resiliency and the hope of transcendence.

In Mina (strong-willed warrior), the cracked and mottled encaustic grays and tans of the upper body and the lazurite torso appear exquisitely weathered, calling to mind classical mythology – Ulysses or Hercules, enduring countless hardships and returning home triumphant and ennobled. Other works, such as Mari (sea star) and Margaux (pearl) are in notable contrast, exploiting porcelain’s delicate, light-filled fluidity, further enhanced by her use of creamy white and celadon high fire glazes. In Mari, geometric patterns contrast with the bird imagery, an anthropomorphic representation of the everchanging yet constant sea. In Isamu (bravery) Legge has incorporated fused glass in gold, violet and black tied with cloth to the back of an darkened clay warrior and standing on a rusted section of ibar. The glass sections are spear-like and magical in appearance, an appropriation from nature offering protection from unseen dangers.

The abstracted figure has always been a visual preoccupation for Legge – particularly as it relates to the Japanese idea of “zan ketsu no bi” – finding beauty in something missing. Perhaps not beauty alone but that particular kind of beauty that is tied up with meaning - as in poetry where the heart of the matter might be found as much in what is omitted as in what is present.

III. I don’t like absolute perfection. I believe one should make a struggle towards something one can’t do rather than do the thing that comes easily.

- HENRY MOORE

Growing up in Connecticut, Legge had access to New York City and a generous exposure to the arts. The role of the artist in the family appeared to be taken by her older brother and she was supposed to be the writer – or so the story went. She finished her B.A. in English at Boston University and moved to New York to work for Conde Nast publications, getting a masters degree in film history at NYU. The call of becoming an artist had been beckoning Legge for years, most notably at age 19 when she saw Giacometti’s work for the first time at the Chicago Art Institute.

“It stopped me dead in my tracks,” she remembers “and I felt compelled to see it for a second time before I left Chicago.” On her 30th birthday, a friend gave her a set of watercolors. “I had landed on the right side of my brain (and the right side of my life) for the first time.” There was no going back.

Legge studied at Pratt, the New York Studio School and finally the National Academy of Design, where the opportunity to work consistently with models led to her to the realization that the figure and sculpture was to be her chosen direction.

Legge’s process is one of exploration and discovery. She regards the clay as a collaborator in her process. “I like to feel the breath within the skin of the clay,” she once remarked to an interviewer writing about her work, “When the clay is very malleable, you can capture that sense of life.” Her aim is not to replicate the human figure, but to get at something more essential – the human condition, the transitory nature of all things and the nobility of the struggle to find meaning.

- DONNA SEAGER July, 2015

IV. Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth, and these are two kinds of generic givens of life, if you look at it poetically, biblically, the idea of the life of beings, of man, being transitory, the earth abides-ashes to ashes, dust to dust-man returns to earth, grows out of earth like a flower, wilts, goes back to the earth...

We are frail, transitory creatures with aspirations of immortality, conscious of our inevitable death, and we have to deal with it somehow.

- STEPHEN DE STAEBLER

Cade

(Celtic, Battle) 2013 7.5 x 2 x 1 in raku-fired porcelain, found iron

Cari

(Turkish, Gentle Stream) 2014 8.5 x 2.5 x 1 in porcelain

Dora

(French, Gift) 2014 10.5 x 3.5 x 1 in porcelain

Eda

(Anglo-Saxon, Noble) 2014 20 x 4 x 2 in porcelain

Dela

(Anglo-Saxon, Kind) 2014 13 x 4 x 3 in porcelain

Tara

(Gaelic, Rocky Hill) 2013 13.5 x 4.5 x 3 in porcelain, found iron

Eva

(Greek, Life) 2015 28.5 x 5 x 3 in porcelain, glass

Margaux

(French, Pearl) 2015 9 x 5 x 2 in porcelain, found iron

Eryn

(English, Peaceful) 2011 12 x 2.5 x 2 in porcelain

Isa

(Hebrew, Iron-willed) 2013 10 x 5 x 3 in raku-fired porcelain, found iron

Mari

(Hebrew, Sea Star) 2014 6 x 3 x 1 in porcelain

Mariko

(Japanese, Circle) 2015 20 x 4 x 4 in porcelain, found iron

Payne

(Latin, Rustic Man) 2013 9.5 x 2 x 1.5 in raku-fired porcelain, found iron

Mignon

(French, Petite) 2012 8 x 2.5 x 1.5 in porcelain

Nara

(Japanese, Stability) 2015 8 x 2.5 x 3 in porcelain

Mina

(English, Strong-willed Warrior) 2013 9 x 2.5 x 1 in porcelain, encaustic

Morgana

(Celtic, Sea Dweller) 2003 16 x 4 x 1.75 in raku-fired porcelain, found iron

Trigg

(Norse, True) Homage to Giacometti’s The Chariot, 2015 9 x 3 x 3 in porcelain, found iron

Pelle

(Greek, Rock) 2009 15.5 x 3 x 3 in raku-fired porcelain

Thyra

(Greek, One Who Carries a Shield) 2015 15 x 3 x 3 in porcelain, found iron

CLAY and GLASS

Isamu

(Japanese, Bravery) 2015 13 x 3 x 2.25 in raku-fired porcelain, fabric, fused glass, found iron

Isamu

(Japanese, Bravery) 2015 13 x 3 x 2.25 in raku-fired porcelain, fabric, fused glass, found iron

BRONZE

The Conversation 2005 13 x 10 x 8.5 in bronze

Tor II

(Norse, Fortified Place) 2006 51 x 14 x 5.5 in bronze

Petra

(Latin, Stone) 2005 15 x 5 x 2 in bronze

Muir

(Scottish, Moor Dweller) 2005 9.5 x 2.25 x 1 bronze

Eta

(Teutonic, Small One) 2005 7.25 x 3.25 x 1 in bronze

NANCY LEGGE

EDUCATION Pratt Institute, New York, NY The Studio School, New York, NY The National Academy of Design, New York, NY Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA, (Kirstie Rea) Mendocino Art Center, CA (Stephen De Staebler; John Toki) SELECTED SOLO AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2015 Seager Gray Gallery, Personae, Mill Valley, CA

Seager Gray Gallery, Art Market, San Francisco, CA

Seager Gray Gallery, All in the Family, Mill Valley, CA 2014

2013

Waterfront Artists Coalition, Figuratively Speaking, Brooklyn, NY Susan Street Fine Art, Sculpture Spotlight: Nancy Legge and Carl Dahl, Solano Beach, CA Seager Gray Gallery, Women’s Work, Mill Valley, CA Seager Gray Gallery, Summer Salon, Mill Valley, CA

2005 The Branson School Gallery, From Callanish to California, solo exhibition, Ross, CA CFA Gallery, San Francisco International Art Exposition,

San Anselmo, CA 2004 PRO ARTS Gallery, New Visions: Introductions ’04, juried

by Rene di Rosa and Jack Rasmussen, Oakland, CA

CFA Gallery, The Figure in Art: New Explorations of Bay

Area Tradition, San Anselmo, CA

Sebastopol Center for the Arts, White on White: New

Figurative Sculpture, solo exhibition, Sebastopol, CA

Sanchez Art Center, elements: 2 painters and a sculptor, Pacifica, CA 2003

Tierra Solida, Clearly Black & White, Santa Barbara, CA Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Annual Juried Exhibition, Juror’s Award, Sebastopol, CA Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sculpture, curated by Manuel Neri, Sebastopol, CA

2012

Seager Gray Gallery, Figures in Abstract, Mill Valley, CA

2011

Pryor Fine Art, Fall Salon, Atlanta, GA Pryor Fine Art, Introductions, Atlanta, GA Donna Seager Gallery, New Work by Gallery Artists, San Rafael, CA Susan Street Fine Art, Forever and Floating, Solano Beach, CA

2010

L.H. Horton Jr. Gallery, San Joaquin Delta College, Visions in Clay, Stockton, CA Donna Seager Gallery, San Francisco Fine Art Fair, San Francisco, CA

PUBLICATIONS

Marin Independent Journal, July 6, 2006, The Mystery of Stone and Human Form, Working Artist Profile by Christine Brenneman.

Lincoln Arts and Cultural Foundation, Feats of Clay XXI, Lincoln, CA Kellogg University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Ink and Clay 34, Pomona, CA

500 Figures in Clay: Ceramic Artists Celebrate the Human Form, Lark Books, 2004.

Artweek, November, 2004, Review of New Visions: Introductions ’04, Juried Exhibition of California Artists.

Ceramics Monthly, Work featured in Upfront, February, 2003.

2008

2007

Kellogg University Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Ink and Clay 33, Pomona, CA

2006

Donna Seager Gallery, Finding the Figure, Waldemar Mitrowski and Nancy Legge, San Rafael, CA

2002 Falkirk Cultural Center, Memorias: El Dia de los Muertos, San Rafael, CA Marin County Civic Center, It Figures: Figurative Work

by Eighteen Marin County Artists, San Rafael, CA Falkirk Cultural Center, Falkirk 2002 Marin Artists Exhibition, curated by Claire Carlevaro, San Rafael, CA

I want to express the quality of erosion in the loss of limbs over time and the rooting of the figure to the earth in time, so that it becomes in its way an extension of the earth, which we are. We only exist by the grace of the earth’s nature.

- STEPHEN DE STAEBLER

Muir, (detail)

(Scottish, Moor Dweller) 2005 9.5 x 2.25 x 1 bronze