The Bridge #3, Nancy Legge

Nancy Legge remains ever true to her vision and inspiration, while increasing her artistic vocabulary, both in materials and scale. She maintains a fluid method of working, primarily in porcelain. She considers the clay a collaborator in the process and the creative process a dance where artist and material receive clues from one another and work in concert. “In the porcelain pieces in particular,” she says, "fired or unfired, porcelain is seductive. It has an energy all its own. When rolled paper thin, it is as delicate as silk, ethereal. It has its own voice, its own effortless movement. As long as you 'listen' and don't get in its way. When Jean Arp said that, 'the essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow,' he could have been talking about porcelain."

The Stones of Callanish, those monolithic ancient stones from the Outer Hebrides in Scotland have been and remain Legge’s primary inspiration and continue to inform her exquisite navigation in that space between abstraction and figuration. From the beginning, she saw the circled monoliths as elusively figurative and she imagined the power and mystery possible by transforming varied rock-like shapes into a suggestion of the human form. The forms are archetypal and primal, clearly related to the earth, and in their materials, both durable and fragile. Her compelling and mysterious forms come into being much like her inspiration -- the ancient Precambrian metamorphic rock that formed the stones, their source dating back anywhere from 4.6 billion to 541 million years ago in the hot center of the earth.

Asked about how she is doing in shelter in place, she says, “I just moved to Benicia. During this strange time, I am walking a lot along the Carquinez Strait, watching the geese and hawks fly overhead wild, unaware.” She is reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart and she is painting.