“Close at Hand” Drawing Series
Like the monumental inflatable sculptures for which she is renowned, Nancy Davidson’s new drawings pulsate with a vibrant simplicity that is manifoldly evocative and impossible to pin down. Pared down to essential biomorphic abstractions yet gesturally dynamic, these bilateral, braced, and weighted forms bring to mind inanimate figures like knots, balls and chains, and balloons, as well as cultural references such as the spread legs of cowgirls or ancient female idols. But above all, these works evoke the body: bringing to mind legs and heads, fallopian tubes and ovaries, testicles, nipples, and other erogenous knobs. As such, they evoke our life force: at once vulnerable and resilient, vibrant and comical, yet tinged with a whiff of the grotesque, as befits their inspiration by Beckett’s Happy Days. These energetic drawings speak not only to Davidson’s ground-breaking body of work, but to the absurd and valiant determination with which Winnie grasps at the fleeting imprisonment in a sinking body that is her only reprieve from the abyss.
About the author: Susan Lewis is the founder and editor-in-chief of Posit . a group of drawings from the “Close at Hand” series appeared in Posit #37
All drawings: “Close at Hand”, ink on Yupo paper, 2024
