Catch This Stunning Nasher Public Project Before It’s Gone

This Sunday, September 12, is the very last day to see the latest Nasher Public project at Nasher Sculpture Center. Created by Indiana-born, Dallas-based artist Linda Ridgway, Herself brings together five works to form a meditation on time, memory, and touch.

Central to the piece, a dress inked for a printing press at Austin’s Flatbed Press, is surrounded by different objects (an image of a clock, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland text) related to Ridway’s life and experiences she’s gone through over the months of the pandemic and after.

You’ll find “Fallen upon the corner of the moon” in the exhibit, an ink and white charcoal on paper creation that features an image of the dress, inverted, like Alice wears as she tumbles down into the rabbit hole.

Having a strong appreciation for poetry, Ridgway often incorporates poet Robert Frost’s writing in her work. Her sculpture, “The leaves whisper on their branches,” combines the title of Frost’s “Sound of Leaves” with Walk Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

Herself is a personal and intimate representation of Ridgway’s life as it touches on the 2017 death of her partner, Harry Geffert (founder of Green Mountain Foundry), her closing of the foundry over the past year, moving, and creating a new life. Touching on the isolation that many of us have dealt with during the pandemic, Ridgway’s exhibit is “an assemblage of friends, family, poets, faith, and authors of first lines.”

“I have brought all of these actors into my studio to find comfort from the self-isolation of this past pandemic year,” explains Ridgway in a statement.

Here is Linda Ridgway speaking about her Nasher Public Installation, Herself.