SOBS: Art: A Hell of a Good Universe - The Artwork of Nancy Carrigan

A Hell of A Good Universe -- the Artwork of Nancy Carrigan


	The Astrophysicist & The Ant (diptych) by Nancy Carrigan. Click to enlarge.

With a few twists of skill and a grand imagination, artist, novelist and poet Nancy Carrigan takes microscopic-scale images and merges them with a view of the universe at large. She sees an insect walking across the lawn and compares it with physicists who seek to understand the mysteries of space and time. These thoughts, and the resulting images, create a powerful fusion of the personal with the infinitely large and epic. Her art merges people, objects and concepts in the most unexpected of fashions.

Her work often asks, “Who are we? What are we? Where are we going?” — her poetic nature leads her to add the post-script: “And what is the beauty in all this?” Carrigan’s art combines many elements and sources, ranging from modern dance to modern physics, from Classical and Renaissance art to the cubistic and the surreal. It involves literature and music, politics and passion, all of which reflects the multiform aspects of her life. Her supreme accomplishment is the matching of such wide ranging interests and sources with a purely visual beauty which stuns the eye. Hers is an intellectually questioning vision: sometimes very funny, sometimes very serious, but presented via richly decorated tableaux of great visual magic.

Carrigan’s range of interests extends to the work of modern choreographers whose dancing motions frequently seem to find themselves mixed up with the motions of vibrating quarks and leptons in her graphics. Her art is frequently full of decorative linear fantasy and yet it is grounded in clear, strong designs, with a profoundly sculptural sense, reflecting her love of the clarity and order of Renaissance and Baroque art as well as the fantasy of Persian decorative miniatures. She executed recent work (like “Paso Doble” and “Il Cigno e La Sirena”) in the unusual media of paintings on clear acrylic film for a quasi-stained glass effect, with transparent colors and changes in reflectivity of the painting’s surface.

The Choreographer Dreams, #20 by Nancy Carrigan. Click to enlarge.

Her technical skill as a draftsman, sculptress and printmaker leverages multimedia techniques with virtuosity. Her prints often have a layered appearance, dense with imagery (either self-created or from various sources) and use various processes to suggest a mixing of epochs and styles. Frequently in her work, myths of the past and speculations about the future seem to float in a free-flowing fantasia.

Many literary influences run through Carrigan’s work. One notable series of her prints is done using the opening phrases of the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities as the basis for a print, and each print is, in turn, based on a different city, including Paris, Belfast and Los Angeles. Shakespeare-related works include a ravishing sculpture of Titania, the Queen of the Fairies. Many of Carrigan’s sculptures are made of wood which is cut and assembled into layers to make wall reliefs. These are then painted and usually peppered with smaller sculptures, found objects, toys, or even bits of handwriting.

Carrigan was born in Chapaign, Illinois, where her father was the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. The family moved to Chicago in 1938 when Rev. Bohn was called to become the pastor of the Edgewater Presbyterian Church at Bryn Mawr and Kenmore avenues. Something of this early religious influence can be seen in Carrigan's frequent references to Adam and Eve and imagery, which calls back to the etchings and engravings of Albrect Durer present in her childhood home. Her use of these religious themes explores modern meanings of moral dilemma and universal themes like the nature of love, justice, and the man-made and natural laws that govern our lives.

Carrigan attended some of the best schools in Chicago, including Swift Elementary School and Senn Academy on Chicago’s North Side. College included three years at the University of Illinois and a finishing term at Northwestern University. Further study at Carnegie-Mellon University connected her with sculptor George Koren, and she quotes him as saying, “The reason I teach you the rules is so that you can break them.” This is something Carrigan kept in mind over the years as her approach to both media and content is based in traditional method, but is anything but traditional in application. The term “multi-media techniques” applies to a large portion of her work.

Nancy Carrigan has collaborated extensively with her husband, physicist and science writer Dick Carrigan. Working together as co-authors, the Carrigans have two published science-fiction novels: “The Siren Stars” and “Mushroom in a Minotaur Maze.” (Click here to read a short excerpt from “The Siren Stars.”)

She is also active as a poet, widely published, and has won several prizes for her poetry. She was recently awarded one of three grand prizes by the Dancing Poetry competition of San Francisco, which includes having her poetry choreographed for a dance performance at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco — click here for a few examples of Mrs. Carrigan’s poetry.

Carrigan’s work is the reflection of an imagination which stretches the limits of what we conceive of as real, but it remains, above all, a profoundly humanist art based on the human figure and on things which matter to real folks. It is full of the contrasts of the large and the small, with musings about family, woman, romantic love, and beauty, sitting side by side with the many faceted grand visions of science. Her art might be seen as a reflection of the words of the poet e.e.cummings who wrote, “There’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go!”

Explore the following galleries of her artwork and light the rocket of your imagination.

— Robert Kamezcura

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