Ellen Driscoll
Distant Mirrors Website + FASTFORWARDFOSSIL Paintings on Recycled Plastic
Ellen Driscoll’s Prospectus work relates to her FASTFORWARDFOSSIL installation series (made from #2 plastic) and most directly to Distant Mirrors, which was in the Providence River September – November 2011. In Ellen’s words:
“My recent work maps the consumption of just one oil-derivative product, #2 plastic, in neighborhoods with diverse income strata. The plastic is then transformed into sculptural installations which connect the dots between the geography and the economy of oil from harvest to individual consumption. The visual poetics of these sculptures conflate the mansion and the slum, the luxury hotel and the deforested hillside, and the architectures of power with the landscapes of poverty….My work makes visual the imagined landscape of the future, as a provocation to society to make the changes necessary to adapt to oil’s decline.”
Ellen’s Prospectus project consists of a content-rich website dedicated to research she did on oil and plastic production/consumption for FASTFORWARDFOSSIL as well as documentation of the creation and installation of Distant Mirrors. She also has contributed small paintings on #2 recycled plastic related to FASTFORWARDFOSSIL that will be reproduced for the Prospectus “Box” of artist-made objects and sold individually in the future.
FASTFORWARDFOSSIL
#2 plastic at the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, which provided plastic for Ellen Driscoll’s Distant Mirrors installation.
Ellen Driscoll, Distant Mirrors in the Providence River, 2011
Ellen Driscoll, Paintings 1-4 on #2 plastic, 2012 (the plastic was cut from the sides of gallon HDPE bottles), each approx. 3 x 5.5”
Ellen Driscoll, Paintings 1-3 on photographs on plastic, 2012 (the plastic was cut from the sides of gallon HDPE bottles), each approx. 3 x 5.5”)
From the Distant Mirrors Website
Research data on oil and plastic production/consumption at different geographic scales
Click the images below to download a high resolution PDF of each file.
Data Poster 1
Data Poster 2
Data Poster 3
Data Poster 4
Distant Mirrors Website
Visit the Distant mirrors website at http://www.distantmirrors.net.
Dinner Placemat
Ellen produced this placemat for the dinner following the launch of Artists in Context in October 2009. Click the image below to download a high resolution JPEG of the placemat suitable for printing (9.7 Mb file).
Dinner Placemat
Ellen Driscoll’s sculptures, drawings and installations explore resource consumption and material lineage. Her latest multi-part, multi-year project, FASTFORWARDFOSSIL, highlights the relationship between water and oil consumption and was displayed at Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, as well as in Chicago and Hiroshima, Japan. Driscoll’s previous work includes installations such as “Passionate Attitudes” (Threadwaxing Space, New York, 1995); public art projects such as “As Above, So Below” for Grand Central Terminal (1999); a suite of 20 mosaic and glass works for the tunnels at 45th, 47th and 48th streets in NYC; and “Catching the Drift”, a women’s restroom for the Smith College Museum of Art (2003). She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Anonymous Was a Woman, LEF Foundation, and, most recently, from the Rhode Island Foundation. She currently is head of the sculpture department at Rhode Island School of Design.
