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Donna Dodson's unique voice blends naturalism and fantasy; her meticulous carving and craftsmanship lend authenticity to totemic figures that merge women’s bodies with animal heads. Dodson’s sculptures are reminiscent of Egyptian and Sumerian goddesses, and the work, although relatively small in scale, has the same monumental presence as the ancients. Dodson seems to renounce postmodernist dictums advocating work that "refers" to the body, by creating figurative work that directly symbolizes the body’s emotional meaning. The original magic power of the goddess is invoked in each of Dodson’s sculptures to distill an insight into both the history and present-day faculties of women’s bodies. We can understand, in the intimate scale of her figures, what it might feel like to be a woman at the beginning of the 21st century.
In Dodson’s sculpture, there is no clear delineation between the animal head, the human body, and the abstract yet oddly specific clothing that these animal women wear. "Rhino" manages to wrest a humorous dignity from her outsized, clownish head that sports bright yellow horns: she progresses with an uncharacteristically extended arm, ending in a delicately carved human hand. Caught in mid-stride, her massive feet seem to merge with the wide hem of what could be palazzo pants. "Elk" wears white, elbow-length evening gloves with her wing-backed couture dress, and stylized antlers project above her head like a coiffure, while "Red Lion" is at one with her simple, flaring, full-length gown.
Dodson’s beautifully rendered sculptural surfaces reveal her training in stone carving and ceramics. But it is wood—that most organic and human of materials—that Dodson uses exclusively, and she brings a high finish, a dense and stone-like polish, to wood. She uses a variety of woods for their color properties: ebony for "Rabbit"; cherry for "Red Lion"; lighter colored woods like pine for pieces that have been polychromed. "Pregnant Owl" is striking in the subtle, tan sheen of her pine body and head, which forms an abrupt contrast with the large, gleaming dark beak and dark, rigid wings that flank the gently swelling body. These disparate colors convey an almost aggressive, predatory protectiveness, and unmask conventional notions of serene or Madonna-like pregnancy.
"Rabbit," in ebony, is a polished columnar form that glows with the kind of deep-space radiance found in ancient Santa Clara blackware. Like Dodson’s other animal women, this sculpture stands erect, ears almost quivering, asserting a presence that is classical in its simplicity and also slightly goofy in its declaration of the slippage between fantasy and strict naturalism. It is as though Bugs Bunny had struck an heroic pose and we were suddenly convinced of his inner nobility as it momentarily overcame his quotidian, trickster persona.
The powerful "Red Lion" epitomizes Dodson’s current body of work. The lion, or lioness (for she has no mane), uses Dodson’s typically economical vocabulary of shapes: rounded breasts sit on top of a columnar body that flares, gown-like, at the bottom; rigid, stylized arms end in sharp points; and a large, benign head beautifully abstracts the essential shapes of a lion’s muzzle, ears, and eyes. The symmetrical carving and satiny surface echo the towering, hieratic stone sculptures of ancient Egyptian deities, although this piece is only 18" tall. The image veers from the present into the past, albeit a vague and mythic past that has been interpreted for us by Dodson’s adept references to ancient sources. But what draws us immediately into the present are the several long, vertical cracks that pierce the lion’s body, almost splitting it in two. Smaller cracks bisect the muzzle, and run along the left cheek and forehead. Would an artist with such obvious control of her materials simply ignore this fracturing of the piece’s subtle, polished forms?
It is the tension between the purity of smooth, highly finished surfaces and the cracks and fissures, knots and imperfections, that Dodson allows in her wood, especially "Puppy," "Seagull Cinderella," and "Red Lion," that speak of a sensibility beyond mere facility of technique. The obvious interpretation on the part of the viewer is to compare these cracks to the rifts and strains in a perfect facade, here the facade of well-dressed womanhood. But what is really at stake is the vision of the artist as she grapples with the physicality of her materials, judging at each stage of carving what it is the wood will do at a given point in time. The subtle marks of the artist’s hands and the craftsmanlike intent of the sculptures that Dodson creates, through hours of intense labor, are what this work is about as much as any of the sculpture’s overt content. Dodson’s pieces would not resonate if she sent her maquettes to be carved by others, or had studio assistants do her work. The result of long periods of time spent shaping intractable materials to her vision is a resolute grace that gives meaning and authority to the images she illustrates. The cracks Dodson chooses to leave in the perfect surface of "Red Lion" are a testament to the condition of creating: the artist’s decision to incorporate random events into well-understood technique.
Donna Dodson is a sculptor at the beginning of her career. Yet already she has demonstrated a complex vision of women’s physical being. Her animals, carved from once-living wood, are given their own lives rich in association, color, and shape. She has taken the old saw, "timeless female form," co-opted it, and made it humorous, and grave, and new, in her beautiful carvings.
Carolyn Wirth
Writer and Editor, New England Sculptors Association
February 2005