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What characterizes Puckett’s work, both two- and three-dimensional, is its extraordinarily vivid presence. The attentiveness and empathy she lavishes on a kind of making and materials once associated with drudgery, has burnished them into something more sublime, an ars poetica of the domestic. Like Penelope, Puckett shows us whose in charge—and who should be.
—Lilly Wei, Art Critic, 2018
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“You are collecting things that one time probably had a certain kind of function. In your work I think about the act of wrapping, as an act of caring for something, of you know, nurturing it, putting a scarf around it or swaddling, or even mummification, like the act of wrapping is kind of a type of care. I think of the way you give it another life.”
– Shari Mendelson, Artist, 2020
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Puckett’s sculptures take on human qualities. She uses yarn and other fabrics to obsessively wrap scrap objects. Like the artist Judith Scott, Puckett uses inexpensive and scrap material—scraps of fabric, ribbon, and craft yarn that she wraps around commonplace objects, such as wire planters or a dirty-clothes hamper. The easily recognizable materials used to wrap the objects add to the mystery of what the object underneath could possibly be. The sculptures become works of complete abstraction and take on new shapes. The household objects are no longer identifiable in the end.
-Becky Nahom, Curator, from “Form of Touch”,SVA MA Curatorial Practice exhibition at Pfizer Building, 2017
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Courtney Puckett’s work occupies a space among countless artists in its use of craft materials like yarn, scrap fabric and tinsel. Tapestry and weaving have long been tools of storytelling, especially for artists (often women) to whom more traditional art forms have been inaccessible. Puckett’s piece takes this a step further, her classical approach to the figure lending fresh significance to epics like Homer’s Odyssey, in which Penelope uses weaving to manipulate her patriarchal destiny. The wrapping and re-wrapping of the foundation of these figures is obsessive and yet tender, with an attention to detail and care akin to the binding of a wound.
-Kristen Frederickson, Curator, from “Text/ure”, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, 2017 -
“Soft Art” used to be a thing. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, there were exhibitions of that title, and fiber sculpture – by figures like Eva Hesse, Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, and Magdalena Abakanowicz – was in vogue. These artists’ pliant forms offered a welcome respite from hard-edge painting and minimalism. They also seemed to introduce a particularly female (if not yet explicitly feminist) sensibility. Fast forward fifty years or so, and you find Courtney Puckett waiting for you, fabric and scrap wood and wire and string and graph paper in hand. She has embraced softness as a dominant aesthetic, conceiving it not just as a gendered quality, but also a way of thinking."
—Glenn Adamson, Curator, Historian, Writer, 2018
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Courtney Puckett: Sculpture Studies 2019-2020
Limited edition Artist Book of drawings
For Puckett, drawings are not plans for the sculptures but two-dimensional conceptual maps for working intuitively in three-dimensions.
- Edition of 100
- Signed and numbered
- With an essay by artist Michelle Segre
50% from each sale will be donated to The Pawling Resource Center
Pawling Resource Center in Pawling, NY offers assistance to anyone in need in the immediate community, especially the hungry, the elderly, and the homebound.
https://www.pawlingresourcecenter.org/mission/
Available for purchase in our Shop
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Available Works
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Courtney Puckett: In Conversation with Shari Mendelson
Past viewing_room
