Sophie Eisner gives Nora Iasigi Bullitt Memorial Lecture
The poetic and philosophical work of Sophie Eisner combines the hard and the soft, in both tangible materiality and the emotive and psychological nuances of color and space. Her work quietly unveils the need for the other, like flesh and bones, in order to achieve life and balance. Her objects frequently offer a sense of waiting to receive or provide for an interaction, an experience. Relaxed silicone forms draped or suspended like the skin that is shed after a useful life, speak to the dignity of labor’s relationship to having lived. Her installations are at once playful and somber, evoking a presence of the space as an entity, one that has been formed through relationships with others, one that waits for us to form a relationship with it.