Selected Excerpts from Reviews

“Driscoll’s work is not merely sensuous. It is designed to engage the body, to work with the natural motions of hands, wrists, arms, and elbows. Sometimes a very uninhibited interactor will embrace a piece and lay a cheek to its surface… Knowing these works takes leisure and intimacy…We learn how little time we usually allot to seeing art…She teaches us that looking is not the same as knowing.”

Marty Carlock, "Rosalyn Driscoll: Touching Required" in Sculpture, December 1998





“I touch a hand, it moves on its string, I feel the coolness of the stone, visceral memories of other stones flicker…The sculptural hand touches me back in a way that a purely visual experience never can. The object is purely itself and the moment of touching, though unique, is profoundly connected to many other moments of touch, of feelings. A connection is made, boundaries are lessened.”

Christine Holderness, "Skin Deep" in Brattleboro Reformer, December 2005


Comments from Viewers

I am transported to another world. This is important, moving, deeply "touching" work.

What you find with your hand are the spaces, while your eyes find the objects.

Such a dynamic experience, very deep with curiosity and anxiety.

I keep thinking of the loss, that I lose my touch when my eyes are open. I’m separate from the pieces. When I was touching they were the whole world. I was inside the experience. My eyes are from the outside. Maybe it’s like Janus: turn the eye over to find the finger, turn the finger over, there’s the eye. They’re one organism. Then they can deepen each other.

Ordinary objects will never feel the same again.

You really get to know a piece. You know every little nuance and detail, whereas if you looked, you’d see it overall.

You just get to be. No expectations. You get to be and feel and there’s no right or wrong.

We take in so much visually and then think we know it.

At first I was afraid—how could I know? Then, upon first touch, joy, a different knowing,

This experience is very fundamental, basic, primitive, more direct than intellectual experiences and therefore stronger.

Information taken in through the fingers was tactile and spatial, but it was a sense of space I have never experienced before, because it was not made finite and given limits by visual measurement. I sensed in a way I've only toyed with before. It was like taking LSD.

It was a revelation. I loved crossing the taboo of touching art—like a feast I never thought would be offered.

We are a touch-deprived culture.  This art helps to heal that lack.

The scale is fixed with sight; in the imagination it can be very big or very small.

There was a visual field of darkness with the blindfold.  As soon as my hands went inside the opening, the visual field suddenly went much blacker, from charcoal grey to velvet black.

I imagined water had poured over the surface a long time. My hands were water.

My hand reached a place inside where it didn’t touch anything; everything dropped away and I was standing in a void, in the wind on a mesa.



 
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