Rendered with hyper-realistic precision, Devra Fox’s graphite drawings of anthropomorphized plant forms muse on notions of containment outside of the body. In seamlessly grafting anatomical features like spinal vertebrae or arterial chambers with vegetal offshoots, she extends the metaphor of the vessel beyond the somatic. Thoughts, memories, and emotions are embodied and compartmentalized into spliced forms, creating equivalencies between cellular renewal and psychological repair.
This interconnection between inner and outer worlds, and more broadly, amidst cyclical stages from birth until death, govern the symmetries and counterbalances within Fox’s works. In Holding Place, stones resembling the shape of lungs appear nestled in and out of a plant rib cage, intertwining the inanimate with the living. In Linked Prospect, two downward facing lilies hang cantilevered over a cavernous black void. Like balancing scales, their weights shift with the cathartic release of water droplets measuring progress or the passage of time.
Sticking to monochromatic compositions, Fox’s gradients of a singular hue explore fluctuations across a spectrum of an isolated idea or emotion. Graphite’s range on a gray scale from light to dark encapsulate the opacities of closed containers on one end, the unknowable depths of cavities on the other, and the porous seepages in between.
Always operating on dualities, Limbs, derived from the Latin limbus meaning “edge” perfectly encapsulates the fine line that Fox straddles between the floral and corporeal, the mind and body, and interior and exterior.
