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Listening
to Trees
BY ARLENE RAVEN
Nancy Azara's
wall assemblages
and freestanding sculptures
of the past 25 years
are made mostly
of the trunks and limbs
of trees.
The artist,
following Drudish forebears
occupied by the hallowed nature
of the arboreal,
finds her spirit
with the magicians, sorcerers,
and soothsayers
of old,
in the oldest of perennial passions—
for radix, sapling, pod, and hull.
Azara's catholic childhood
conjured meditations
on the Saints and their Father
which, contrarily, brought her to
the Goddess and her Progeny.
In function and placement,
the walls of the freestanding
Spirit House
shelter a carved floor of
nascent spirals
you can walk around.
Inside,
three pearlescent panels
are engraved with signs of the
honeycomb.
These vivid aural surroundings
call up the golden spiral
beneath the shell
of the shrouded diety.
NANCV AZARA EXHIBITIONS:
November 17-January 7,
E.M. Donahue Gallery, New York
City; November 15-December 3,
A.I.R Gallery, New York City; January
22-March 19, Tweed Museum of
Art in Duluth, Minnesota.
ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995