​​Rosalyn Driscoll, United States

From the beginning, ​Rosalyn Driscoll's work has been sourced in the human body, not as it appears but as it is experienced. This interest led to making sculptures that explore touch as a way of knowing a work of art. She made tactile sculptures, initially for people with visual disabilities, and found that touching enriches the aesthetic experience for everyone. Her sculptures and installations are no longer explicitly tactile, but they continue to draw from, and speak to, the inner somatic senses such as balance, pressure, motion and emotion. Her book on aesthetic touch and the somatic senses in the visual arts is being published by Bloomsbury this December.

She discovered rawhide during a residency in New Mexico in 2001, incorporating its malleable, mottled surfaces and amber color into her sculptures. Rawhide, the untanned skin of cows, evokes animals’ life, death and transformation, as well as our own. She sometimes uses neon and light in her sculptures, and collaborates with filmmakers to integrate moving images into a sculpture’s structure and meaning, transforming both matter and image. She is currently collaborating with a dancer/choreographer, integrating her sculptures and raw materials into performances. She is collaborating with a theater company on a performance that dramatizes people’s relationship with water, and with an ecologist to make artworks that reveal the complex structure of natural springs.

Driscoll is a core member of Sensory Sites, an international collective based in London that explores multi-sensory perception in its installations. Her work has received awards and fellowships from New England Foundation for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council (twice), and residencies at Dartington Hall Trust, UK, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Qoricancha in Cuzco, Peru. 

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