Sally S. Fine
born 1948, Aurora, IL
works in Boston, MA
Woman in Trees, 1996, fiberglas, bark, steel, fiber, 100" x 16" x 30", Lent by the Artist, Site-specific installation
Sally Fine's work concerns relationships between humans and the natural world on many levels. Here, as in much of her outdoor sculpture, she creates a narrative scene. A birch bark-clad female mannequin is inserted into a pre-existing stand of young birch trees to establish a poetic image of identification with nature, a mystical moment of becoming. Woman in Trees refers specifically to an ancient Greek myth in which the nymph Daphne, pursued with lustful intentions by the god Apollo, appeals to her father (a river god) to turn her into a laurel tree in order to avoid Apollo's embraces. This story, related in Ovid's Metamorphoses, has been the subject of many works throughout the history of sculpture in the West. Here, the artist gives the tale a distinctly New England flavor. Fine is also interested in the mannequin as a sculptural object and as an artificial cultural ideal. She stresses the irony of inanimate human figures used as stand-ins for real women by revivifying a mannequin with living materials.
