An instance of perfect riot
By William Zimmer (Contributing critic for the New York Times)
What to do with the past, a personal past, is a rich artistic dilemma. Proust spent several decades in bed, in his famous cork-lined room fashioning the long sentences that contain his reverie. Lenne Nicklaus Ball is a different kind of sentimental artist altogether; she is restless and energetic. In 2004 her favorite grandmother died and Lenne seized on a large trove of costume jewelry. She wanted it because it strongly made her grandmother palpable. For that reason she didn't want to put the jewelry away as a keepsake or wear it herself.
Lenne's art isn't a product of deep thought but of instinct and a penchant for thinking widely. She is a traveler having been to the usual places but also off the beaten path. Her house is full of objects that bespeak a love of the exotic such as life-size jungle animal in metal and monumental Chinese vases way too tall to peer into. So it was almost second nature for her to come up with ostrich eggs as the canvas for displaying her grandmother's passion.
First of all they're serviceable. An ostrich egg is about 24 times the size of a chicken egg, and so is an ample armature for supporting the items of jewelry. A pedigree exists: the shell of an ostrich egg is very thick, and in some parts of Africa decorations are carved into it. Although Lenne arranges the earrings, pins, necklaces and other items into artful compositions that go against the egg shape/ the shape resembles the head of a mannequin.
The world is full of things one never thinks of before until the appropriate moment arises. Along with cartons of ostrich eggs, Lenne ordered decorous stands that look a little like those that support library books for easy reading. But Lenne realized that the bases had to share the eggs' excess. Objects near at hand/ candlesticks for instance/ are tried out with the secondary aim of putting the eggs at different heights in the aggregate arrangement, like a class picture. The imposing egg-shapes, bejeweled and in a 'crowded grouping, seem very lively and animated. They compose the kind of tribute that seems appropriate to someone who was very active in the cultural life of St. Petersburg, Florida.
Lenne's grandmother undoubtedly had real jewelry, too, but she had perpetually red hair. In keeping with the times and her social position, her flamboyance was pretty much reined in. But a taste for costume jewelry indicates an awareness that life is fleeting. The glamour that might accompany it is ephemeral and of the moment and the more alluring for it.
One reason that art is magical is that the artist is sometimes working with age-old symbols and meanings that he or she is unaware of. When deep antecedents and resonances are brought to light, the work can acquire an awesome dimension and certainly an existence of its own.
The connections go deep: the Ancient Egyptians had many uses for hollowed-out ostrich eggs; one of them was as storage jars for perfumes - an aspect obviously pertinent to Lenne's grandmother as is the fact that Germans in the late middle ages drank from tall vessels that were upside-down ostrich eggs mounted on pewter stands. But their most stunning appearance was in Italian Renaissance art, most notably in Piero della Francesca's "Pala Montefeltro" - a portrayal of the Immaculate Conception. The link with the religious mystery is that ostrich eggs are laid in sand and, with no parents around, warm in the sun. In Pierce painting a single ostrich egg hangs by a gold chain from a large scallop shell on the ceiling of the imagery architecture. As it is an instance of perfect quiet, Lenne's recent art is an instance of perfect riot.