These extraordinary and peculiar sculptures by Christina Bothwell play with transparency, opacity, and the meanings conveyed by textural contrasts. Suffering seems to engrave the faces of her figures and to stamp its personality upon them. They have a naive simplicity along with their subtle symbolic tones. I have never seen sculptures quite like these before, and they are instantly distinctive and unforgettable. Her rendition of the sleeper using solid, opaque substance for the physical form and that lovely, occluded-glass material for the astral body or spirit is such a succinct, apt, and beautiful visual metaphor. Friendship, childhood, transformation, isolation, the aching love and expectancy of motherhood, the waking nightmares of life…everything within the shadowy depths of the vast human heart seems embodied in her bold yet delicate sculptures.
