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Eastport, population 1,600—known as the place where the sun first rises in the United States each day—is also home to Elizabeth Ostrander, a sculptor of faces both poignant and powerful. Yes, there are hands, often torsos, sometimes whole bodies, but it’s the faces you can’t forget. For 22 years now, Ostrander has lived and worked in a cottage on Clark Street, not far from the city’s center, with a garden crisscrossed with walkways, all manner of flora, and some of the sculptures that are part of her “tribe.”
Ostrander is a rooter, and she puts down roots with her galleries, too: A founding member of the Eastport Gallery, she also has long-standing affiliations with the Leighton Gallery, in Blue Hill, and the Giving Tree Gallery, in East Sandwich, Massachusetts. She is currently at work on a collaborative project on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, scheduled for an exhibition at the University of Maine at Machias in June 2007.
Ostrander grew up just outside of New York City. The daughter of a theater designer and a costume designer/director and the granddaughter of a painter, she came to clay at the age of 17 with a familial understanding of the artist’s life. Ostrander’s sculptures insist you pay attention; it’s almost impossible to pass by them without lingering, without acknowledging both their whimsy—for often there is whimsy—and their darkness. Caught in the midst of a gesture, of an experience, of a thought, these pieces depict people of enormous emotion.
Your sculptures look to me as if they are living this life, in the middle of some happening. That they come from some story you already know about them.
I’ve never really thought about it, but I think that is true—although I’m not necessarily aware of it at the beginning.
How do you begin a sculpture?
I go straight to the face and the hands. We don’t smell each other like animals; we look to the face, to the hands for our clues about someone. Just like I’m doing with you here in this conversation. I think that’s why many of my pieces are not full figures; they’re implied.
How did clay become your medium?
I had been ill, and when I was sick my father had bought me a little armature and some self-hardening clay. And I fell in love with sculpture, with the tactileness of it. I began to go into the city to study with Jose de Creeft [Spanish/U.S. sculptor 1884–1982], and life has never been the same.
Was it something about de Creeft?
Well, it was the clay, and de Creeft. When I first met him, before the class, I was worrying about what to bring, what I needed. He said to bring a knife and a spoon, or a knife and a fork, something like that. What he meant was, your tools aren’t necessary. What’s necessary is your heart, your experience, what you’re going to do. It’s about what’s inside you—it’s about bringing yourself out in this manifestation. That was an enormous gift to receive in the beginning.
You’re from New York City, but you’ve been in Eastport for a long time. Two cities, but what a difference!
Definitely. When I first came here, I was questioning who I was, who I wanted to be, all those big transitional changes—but from the beginning, I felt I belonged here. I tend to work at night, and this place is very cocooning. It’s an island [part of Moose Island along Passamaquoddy Bay, and bridged to the mainland]. In New York, the culture is describing you. Here in my garden, the rocks, the garden all contribute to my feeling, my humanness. And that all gives rise to my artistic impulses and pulls.
It must be a strong, focused impulse. It would be pretty difficult to come upon one of your sculptures in New Mexico or Massachusetts or Eastport and not know they were related.
As my son says, they all come from the same tribe.
And I notice a trait of that tribe is a way they hold their heads—whether it’s a tilt or a bend or a lift, it’s clearly theirs.
An interesting observation. I studied ballet in my teens. I use the neck a lot. I find it a very expressive element of the body. I like to think that they are in their own reverie. They know they are filled with their own spirit, their own beauty, their own sense of being—just like that ballet dancer, they’re aware of themselves, but it’s never an excluding sense.
And there’s also something about the face itself.
Long ago I was a big fan of Modigliani [Italian painter, 1884–1920], who has these very elongated faces. It’s another aesthetic that has stayed with me. If you really look at a human face, it’s often scrunched up. I like to have room in the face—to enter it—so I create that; I give the face an opening, a way in.
What about the process?
My work is coil and slab, hollow on the inside, a pottery-type technique. And then on the surface, I can texture it, collage it. I work in layers. Even after the sculpture is all of a piece, I can alter it tremendously, and I do.
Tell me about the surprise in your process. It must be there. I can see it.
Well, it’s like being pregnant. Who is in there? That sense of surprise and anticipation. So often something will come, and it’s like, “Oh, hello! So that’s who you are!” Like these [she points to two sculptures, Trouble for Paradise and Bound in a Vessel of Contradictions, one on each side of her sitting room].
What do you mean?
These two are different from most of my recent work. I think that my work has either been predominantly joyous or predominantly dark, but these pieces clearly have both aspects, probably just as we all do. I think of them as experiencing both the angels and the devils, and the conversation that results. This work deals with opposing impulses. It’s edgier. And did you notice the glass eyes? [You can’t help but notice the glass eyes.] That alters how they carry themselves. And now that they’ve arrived, I’m just very interested in seeing how these sculptures carry themselves into the world.
