It is challenging to concretely discern what Mia Westerlund Roosen’s purpose in creating most of her sculptures are as she has no specific style but rather chooses to invent new forms for her personal pleasure and exploration. She can change her medium, style, and purpose in a single moment, priding herself on her ability to not be constrained throughout her ever changing life. But this ability to change her artwork so quickly makes it difficult for a viewer of her pieces to comprehend what her purpose in a given moment was. “The course suggested by her work is marked by starts, stops, and detours, twists, and turns, contingency and affinities, which reflect her changing approach to sculpture.”(5) Therefore to understand her intent in creating Flank II in 1978, which she donated to Western Washington University, it is key to consider her background as an artist and how she changed during the time of the creation of the piece.

She began her career in 1976, two years before creating Flank II. In this time, second-wave feminism was at a high point and women activists were succeeding in drawing attention to their cause. She was inspired, as a beginning artist, by the heightened feminism movement and the emerging minimalism. Her lifelong interest in dancing influenced her to center many of her pieces around the body and how it flows and moves.
“My process has always been about seeing and feeling with the body, not so much about analysis. I think of my pieces as bodies, the depiction of living organisms with very little narrative. The reductive pieces rest with soft breath while the more complex pieces evolve with growth, light and movement, all emanating from the core. The only way I know how to do this is to engage my whole body in the work.”(1)

She confesses that to feel engaged in her work it should be representative of an expressive body. A way that she explains this need of fulfillment for her pieces is: “For me a piece has to be sensuous, no matter what, that is one thing that has to happen.”(6). To achieve this sensuousness of her art, she uses malleable materials that she can mold, touch, and feel with her hands. These intimate and close experiences that she has while creating her pieces can be seen by a viewer of the art, but she became closer and closer to her pieces as her sculpting career developed.

Concrete stucco, a material used in many of her pieces gives her the ability to be connected through molding the material, allowing her to demonstrate the sensuousness of a piece while still being able to have her creations give an appearance of being a heavy mass. Flank II was created with a series of three other pieces: Untitled 1, Untitled 3, and Untitled 4. All these sculptures were made with concrete stucco and inclosed in copper that turns green through a treatment with acid. These pieces are meant to appear heavy while sitting on an outdoor ground, becoming part of the landscape.

The four similarly styled pieces all have biomorphic forms fitting or reaching towards another like puzzle pieces; designed for one another. The two biomorphic forms  in Flank II are triangles fitting atop each other perfectly to form the appearance of a larger triangle. Because we know and understand that the artist explores the movements of bodies it could be inferred that she is representing the connectedness that exists between two beings. Although it is difficulty to truly know what her intent is since she believes that her art has no need to be relating to the physical or to be nonobjective. Mia Westerlund Roosen only demands that her art be expressive which she achieves through her invention of forms and through her exploration of sculpture’s possibilities.

 

Bibliography:

  1. “Mia Westerlund Roosen.” Mia Westerlund Roosen – Artists – Betty Cuningham Gallery. Betty Cunningham Gallery, n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.
  2. “AO On Site – New York: Mia Westerlund Roosen, ‘Juggler,’ ‘Baritone,’ and ‘French Kiss,’ Installation on Park Avenue, Through August 28th, 2010.” AO Art Observed RSS. Art Observed, 30 May 2010. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.\
  3. History.com Staff. “The 1970s.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2010. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.
  4. “Flank II, (sculpture).” SIRIS – Smithsonian Institution Research Information System. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Feb. 2017. <http://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=ariall&source=~%21siartinventories&uri=full#focus>.
  5. Roosen, Mia Westerlund, and Saul Ostrow. Mia Westerlund Roosen: Sculptures 1976-2012. New York, NY: Betty Cuningham Gallery, 2012. Print.
  6. Bcuninghamgallery. “Mia Westerlund Roosen.” YouTube. YouTube, 12 Apr. 2012. Web. 08 Feb. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmvykiQVon0>.

Post Author(s): Buddha Brown, and Hunter Stone

Photo Credit: Hunter Stone