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LENNIE BENNETTGlass artist Ginny Ruffner creates the whimsical, the abstract and sometimes the poignant, years after an accident that left her in a coma.
LAKELAND - Romance and nostalgia cling to the image of the tragic artist. The list of those artists is long and not worth repeating.
Less dramatic and often more remarkable are artists who have had tragedy visited upon them and lived to tell, without exploitation. Such is the case of Ginny Ruffner, who has a sprawling exhibition at the Polk Museum of Art.
She was a successful artist with an impressive resume, trained as a painter but working mostly in glass, when a horrific car accident in 1991 left her in a coma for months. Doctors pretty much gave up on any meaningful recovery. When she came out of the coma, she couldn't speak, and a friend had to show her illustrations of her work so she could relearn what she had been.
Her comeback several years later, and her continued work, have been a refutation and a vindication that lack bitterness, though she has drawn from some dark inner places she visited during her recovery. At first glance, you wouldn't see any of that darkness, only the bright colors and witty, somewhat kitschy approach to her small glass sculptures that occupy the museum's entrance gallery.
Ruffner uses the lampwork technique, in which rods of glass are heated and manipulated over a torch, a method typically reserved for making small decorative items such as jewelry and paperweights.
Ruffner plays off the slightly lowbrow reputation of lampwork, and most of the time transcends it, in glass constructions that call to mind the boxes of Joseph Cornell, filled with allusions and rich in totemic items.
Sometimes you can't be sure if what you're looking at is really glass. The Art Game is a pyramid built with glass sculpted and painted as dice and playing cards, a fence of brightly colored paint brushes and a genre scene of a cozy interior opening to a garden. A clock records the time as 2:30. You can read into it anything you want; Ruffner is talking about chance, mortality, time, the efficacy of art. Glass links painted silver become chains holding it together.
She uses chains in other sculptures, such as Brain Brakes, and whether they are mortal coils to be thrown off or a strong connection to the living is hard to say. They connect a brain of clear glass, a winged heart, a hand holding car keys and various fruits riding on a wheeled platform whose tires are burning flames rather than rubber. You think, isn't this cute, until you dissect its components. After that, it becomes slightly disturbing, like a bad dream you can't fully remember and don't quite understand.
That edgy, dreamlike quality informs most of the other lampwork sculptures, many encased in three-dimensional "boxes" of glass, like scenic design pieces.
Ruffner also loves references to other artists. In The Flow, an organic shape, is painted in the style of Joan Miro. It's attached to sinuous coils fashioned like a vase that are decorated with hundreds of swirls that, closely examined, are copies of the waves from a famous 19th century Japanese print by Katsushika Hokusai. Mobility, from the Conceptual Narrative series, is a study of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. It's all preciously elaborate and exuberant.
For the last several years, Ruffner has become interested in larger, more visceral and abstract work, combining delicate glass forms with massive bronze and steel shapes. The glass doesn't masquerade as anything but itself; the metals are twisted like ribbons into contortions that veer between fantastical and primordial.
Crab Nebula with Floral Stars and 7 Planets alludes to the mass of gas and stars known since the 18th century as the Crab Nebula for the clawlike protrusions of its perimeter. The sculpture, like the astronomical nebula, seems to whirl and turn in bronze and steel gyres that support a steel mesh basket containing clear glass orbs and tendrils ridged in the manner of Venetian glass. (These are blown, not formed, and given the recent local ubiquity of Dale Chihuly, they recall his massed glass objects whether or not that is Ruffner's intention.)
Astronomy students know that the Crab is the most famous among various nebula that includes the Andromeda Nebula. Mythology buffs know that Andromeda, also a constellation of stars, was, in Greek lore, the beautiful young girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a terrible sea god. She was rescued by Perseus, Zeus' son, and they lived in marital bliss until their deaths. So you have lots of connections here: woman in chains, exploding supernovas that grow and consume, objects of radiant light glowing from vast, dark distances, and love triumphing over evil.
Ruffner has five of these amorphous works. Some are really outstanding, but some seem muddled and overly busy, their delicate references too obscurely translated into ungainliness.
The star of the exhibition is an installation in the museum's main gallery called Creativity: The Flowering Tornado, created in 2003. The central image, which you see as smaller manifestations in other works, is a huge vortex of steel tubes torquing up to a canopy of metal cutouts resembling leaves and flowers woven into wires like a bower. On either side of the tornado are filigreed wings. A smaller tornado eddies at a slight distance.
Encircling it are six massive, carved gold leaf frames on easels. The frames, like the glass "boxes," function more as containers. Each is a narrative with a theme Ruffner has explored with massed references in previous works: an oversize metal chain, a flower, a bear trap threatening to close its jaws on a light bulb, a woman's profile bearing halos and horns, a heart, an arrow. They confront us like commandments: Avoid self-judgment. Be aware of beauty (that's the big nose affixed to the flower). Avoid the trap of fear. Have courage with your imagination. Put your will into action. Don't get tied up in the small stuff.
Those, by the way, are not my insights. She titles them such, and if you still miss the point, you may purchase the popup book accompanying the installation. It spells the themes out in charming visuals and somewhat cliched aphorisms.
Unlike most confrontational art, Ruffner's tornado is rife with positive reinforcements, an agent of destruction spewing wisdom, flowers and transcendence. Ruffner deserves great credit for this vision of beauty and empowerment.
It deserves more than a pat response, but invoking Ruffner's preference for cutting to the heart of the matter, I have only a simple explanation for such a world view: When you're given lemons, make lemonade.
- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
Review"Creativity: The Flowering Tornado, Art by Ginny Ruffner" is at the Polk Museum of Art, 800 E Palmetto St., Lakeland, through Sept. 5. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $3 adults and $2 students. Free from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday. (863) 688-7743.