Ellen Brenner-Sørensen's Eye Candy
by Kate Camel
former Chief Curator American Craft Museum, New York
American sculptor Ellen Brenner-Sørensen lives and works in a restored medieval gate-house set within an enchanted walled- gaerden in the small hill town of Pietrasanta in the "Marble Mountains" of Northern Tuscany.
Known since the Middle Ages for its marble yards and skilled marble craftsman, Pietrasanta has become an international center of sculptural bronze casting. Drawn to the town twenty years ago to perfect her skills in marble cutting, Ms.Brenner-Sørensen soon turned her focus to the complex process of bronze casting in the lost wax meythod.
The most ancient of
all metal alloys, bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) has been used for
decorative an useful object 
for furniture , sculpture, tools and weapons for over 5,000 years. Capable
of being cast in molds in diverse ways, it also furnished a surface that
can be chased and engraved to various effects. It can be burnished to
a warm, golden reflective quality or colored by treatment with various
patinas. Time and the elements only add to its surface richness.
Bronze wa last popularly employed in the creation of objects for home use at the end of the nineteenth and into the early years of the twentieth century - especially in the Art Nouveau style. However, the doctrine of individual artistic expression and specialized craft required of bronze production lost out to the modernist objectives of spartan functionalism and industrial standardization. That machine age ideology held sway through most of twentieth century.
Brenner-Sørensen is one of a handful of artist rejuvenating the use of bronze for domestic objects.Absorbed for much of the past decade in femminist and personal issues of domestic terror and rage, Brenner-Sørensen has incorporated the twentieth century's greates iconic imagery of fear- Picasso's Guernica, into an extended series of bronze and marble sculptures shaped into the most basic of domestic objects - humble tables and chairs. The nervous flailing energy and sharply angular quality of these life-sized works transposes Picasso's two dimensional imagery of angst into intimately scaled three dimensional form insinuating home grown panic.
Further, Brenner-Sørensen
has recently adapted bronze table top sculpture into vases, candlestick,
torcheres, bowls, and charges - not intended as unique pieces, but for
limited, serialized production. Thi elegantly wrought collection based
on traditional forms is of a timeless quality that transcends the cycles
of fashion. The largest group of objects in the series are distinctly
shaped, baluster forms varying from robust to extremely attenuated proportions.They
are either smoothly polished, ribbed and beaded, or handled with a textured
shallow surface treatment. They have flared everted lips and flattened
bases that make possible dual use, one end as vase, the other as candlestick.
Another large group of extremely tapered, trumped shaped vases evokes similar Victorian Forms that serve to display long stemmed floral sprays to graceful effect. Conversely, the group of small round bowls offers informal and intimate presentation of short-stemmed varieties. The artist's italian garden has also provided a wellspring of inspiration. Common garden species such as broad-leafed yucca are rendered as entire plants, either fused with baluster vases or placed on tall, slender rods to form beautifully silhouetted torcheres.
The unusual surface texture characteristic of this series is worthy of closer inspection. To form her molds, the artist first develops models in wax. It would seem that she found an ephemeral beauty in the long, trailing strands of wax that are usually considered an annoyance in handling the hot , flowing material.After shaping her forms, she exercises the potential she saw for rich surface decoration by applying strands of wax in flowing curves and densely woven texture onto the surface of her forms. To hemphasize the richly textured pattern achieved, the crevices between the strands and the form's surface have been slightly darkened with a contrasting patina in the final finishing process. This Surface tratment holds all the delight and fashination to the modernist's eye of a Jackson Pollack abstract composition.
Bronze sculpture is never cheap. In deciding to reduce the scale of her work for this series, Brenner-Sørensen is responding to an increased demand for private ownership of her richly surfaced sculptural object. In making them object d'art for home ornamentation - beautiful and delightful with or without th companionship of flowers - she provides welcome relief from or rich complement to stylish, traditional or contemporary minimalist interiors. They will flourish in whatever future cycles of fashion taste may bring.