Making & Feeling
Judy Pfaff
Filmed in 2006 at her upstate New York home and during the installation of Buckets of Rain (2006) in New York City, Judy Pfaff discusses the emotional and creative journey she goes on while conceptualizing, making, and ultimately looking back at her installations.
Pfaff, who begins creating with a sense of what she wants her work to feel like but with very few concrete ideas, relies upon unplanned elements to enter the art so that she herself is surprised with the results.
Featured artists
About the artists
Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments, in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Her work is a complex ordering of visual information, composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions.
