Ellen Babcock

The sculptures of Ellen Babcock walk the line between minimalism, fetish object, surrealism, folk art, and assemblage. Made of materials seemingly salvaged from a suburban garage, her lanky, precariously balanced figures call to mind the human form. “I like to interrupt bland surfaces, drawing out a sense of fragility and a very precarious balance between activities of construction and decay,” Babcock has said. “I often allude to landscape in my arrangements of prosaic materials, hoping to expand the presence of such things as sheetrock or spackle beyond the confines of a wall.” In other works, the artist has evoked the natural world from similarly humble materials, as in Styrofoam icebergs geodes and crystals made of silicone rubber, pigment, cloth, and acrylic.