Judith Ornstein

In the making of art I discover my humanity, which often becomes obscured amid a life that is moving too fast and filled with too much. I’m an abstract artist whose imagery melds poetic impulse with networks of shapes and forms. My work recycles the detritus materials from the ‘Amazon Generation’. Various kinds of honeycomb, fluted and flat corrugate that are the familiar by-products of our throw-away society. The streets are littered with this material. Mundane and found objects become shapeshifters for my creative use and a statement that includes looking to a sustainable future.

Sustainability is strong message but my work is attempting to be many things at once. There is a state of perpetual confusion, a resonating of the landscape/buildings around the city, a nod to 20th Century art and a visceral play of the shape as seen in Ankor Wat or a garbage pile. Cardboard imbues my sculptures with the conflict of permanence and impermanence. Viewers see me as a rescuer of recyclables and my work lives as a sign of cultural excess. I have a real love of this material, whose character naturally has a raw elegance. This brings in emotional content similar to African art. Edges are left raw, shapes obviously hand carved, space is bent and stretched.

My compositions have an awkwardness, and the asymmetries and balanced imbalances are subtly choreographed. Objects and structures are folded into each other with tension points and held together with the desired shapes and lines. Three dimensions allows for the play of light and draws out shadows or radiance of the material. I am bridging the ethereal with the real. Humble materials, like corrugate, bring up the issue of ‘what gives art value’. A most important question in the art world today. My work resides in a space between solidity and fragility. The throw away quality of cardboard reflects an almost organic life span from development through deterioration.

My work is put together in a tangled space as a kind of improvisational universe and is the result of a process. It’s a process that overwhelms my thinking and instinctive reasoning. The work comes together naturally and I try not to overthink the process. Ultimately it is about joining together a variety of elements that advocate for transformation. I value the associative power of abstract images for their capacity to suggest complex ideas with basic shapes. James Baldwin wrote, “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.” I invite the viewer to consider sculptural puzzles in the round from different perspectives and to make sense of the pulp fictions before the them.

Making art is a working process, every day, that engulfs my whole being. The work itself takes me places, suddenly and without reason. I delight in the things I do not plan.