About the Art
Reverie
Nancy Bocek sculpts as a visual language describing the possibilities and complexities of our humanness; the universal, the collective, the individual and who We are.
Sculpting the human figure is a way for her to enquire into our humanity and to express the feelings we harbor of our personal and societal realities.
Barrier
Nancy’s curiosity about who "we" are is explored through the union of clay, figure, color and symbol. She set herself a project to narrow her field to black clay and orange underglaze, realized in the human figure and the spike form, striving to isolate the beauty and meaning that each contributes to the whole.
The Covid-19 pandemic laid ground for new ways of seeing and doing; and building on this project Nancy began in 2019, she is finding a new approach of sketching on clay and sculpting in relief that speak a silent plea for humanity.
Ark
Hard Rain, an installation for Storefronts, a program of Shunpike, flows from the Who We Are Series and further develops an exploration of the spiritual and worldly human experience as harbored within the self.
By allowing the clay and form to be the starting place, then finding the figure within it, Nancy discovers an emotional connection and an unearthing of layers of meanings. She is intuitively guided by absorbing and responding to what is going on in her - our - world.
Hinging on Lies (Heard)
In many of her works, Nancy finds a new context for the human subject through an interaction with a form that has a function in human daily activity.
As our civilization's mundane tools (hinge, spike, saw blade) interact with the individual, we wonder: What does the form symbolize? How does it inform the artwork and interact with the subject? Why do we have a visceral reaction to it? Can it mean different things in different contexts and to different people?
This investigation gives rise to questions regarding modern myths and mythologies and meaning for each individual viewer as well as the artist.
Saint Lilith
In other works, Nancy is considering feminism. As people face threats to the rights to their own bodies and the struggle for equality continues, she is curious about Lilith, mythological “first woman,” said to be Biblical Adam’s first wife: who Lilith was then and who is she now, and how she is relevant to modern times. Lilith is an interesting vehicle for Nancy's questions about gender roles, current political and social issues and also how art history is filtered through her contemporary viewpoint.
Mother of Lost Socks
Self portrait “print” in raw clay and orphaned socks
The occasional self-portrait allows Nancy to experiment with breaking assumptions about self-portraiture conventions. Mother of Lost Socks is a blind first print on her face of clay saturated socks accumulated over the years of doing laundry for her family.
Bonfire
To Nancy, nothing is more enjoyably challenging than translating an idea into an artwork with a life of its own while creating an accompanying visual language through the exploration of form, color and symbol.