The Sorceress of Cedar
by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy



Ursula von Rydingsvard’s dense, eccentric, craggy sculptures fascinate me, yet I can’t remember any art that has made me so strangely uneasy. Her mammoth constructions quiver with power and evocative, disturbing contradictions. These cedar creatures, their scarred and striated surfaces frequently darkened with rubbed-in graphite, are monumental yet intimate, crude yet delicate. Von Rydingsvard is an artist who works on a dauntingly heroic scale while the underlying content of her pieces is intensely personal, even haunted by her memories, for she is a veteran survivor of real struggle.

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