Ana Riesser’s sculptures highlight organic shapes and surfaces that allude to biological forms. Her sculptural practice incorporates a range of materials, not limited to alabaster, marble, and wood. Riesser’s works could be termed anthropomorphic sculptures, mimicking biological appendages and other natural forms to create structural gestalts that reflect growth and development. Her works also have a reliquary quality about them, tempered by their sleek surfaces and sloping contours.
In Cocoon, Riesser creates a kind of assemblage from smoothed wood, cedar, shihuahuaco, and alabaster in an effort to mimic the chrysalis process. The white alabaster form positioned in the wood is similar to an egg, suggesting an embryo not yet fleshed out. The smoothed wood, by contrast, is something like a womb. The flat, polished surface that characterizes both the wooden frame and the alabaster object speaks to the aestheticization of biological processes. Birth life and death are taken in simultaneously. Death in the shape of wood, birth as the alabaster seed, and life in the overall import of the sculptural work, which abstractly formalizes a graduated emergence into form.
