Ceramic sculpture by Becky Gottsegen/Image by Ellis Lucia
Baton Rouge artist Becky Gottsegen maintains that to make the kind of art she does requires two things: a fascination for faces and a sense of humor. Since Gottsegen, a figurative sculptor who works with clay, prefers to make likenesses of people whose faces and bodies reflect the passage of time, it probably helps for her subjects to have a sense of humor too.
Her sculptures—statues of elderly beachgoers, dementia sufferers, presidential candidates—don’t reflect the twin ideals of youth and physical perfection that we are used to seeing promoted in our culture. Instead they explore the effects that time and life’s ups and downs have upon the human form. “I find that older people are much more interesting,” said Gottsegen. “I used to draw with a group named the Highland Road Artists. When they would have models come and sit for us I hated drawing the young ones. I find it much more interesting to sculpt people who have more character to their faces.”
A collector of interesting physical features, Gottsegen often totes a camera, photographing the faces and bodies of the people she can’t stop looking at. “Once you start working in three dimensions you really can’t help it,” she admitted. During a recent trip she became fascinated watching an older couple eating burgers at a restaurant in the Phoenix airport. “He had a very intriguing nose and a receding hairline,” she said. “They just looked like they’d been together for years. I snuck up and took pictures, then went back and introduced myself. They turned out to have been married for twenty years then gotten divorced. She had remarried; her second husband had died, and they had gotten back together. So I came back and sculpted both their heads.”
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In her sculpture Gottsegen isn’t aiming for literal representation, exactly, or caricature. Rather, she works to create character studies that reflect not only her subjects’ outward appearances, but some of what’s going on inside as well. In a series of works named Out of the Mouths of Babes, Gottsegen crafted characters portrayed in a play written by Lafayette resident Patricia Sidman, about the lives of seven actresses and the forces that shape older women living today. She accompanied the statues with speech bubbles containing the sort of tart, black humor remarks that older women sometimes make. “I’m sure Mr. Right will come along one day. Until then, I guess I’ll just stay married,” one statue of a sixty-ish, conservatively dressed woman is saying. Another statue is of Sidman herself, who was turning seventy. For Sidman’s bubble the playwright had chosen to have herself saying “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings when I called you ‘stupid.’ I thought you knew.” Gottsegen explained: “When I was deciding what to do with the pieces in the Lafayette show I was thinking about the idea of women being in ‘old roles.’ Laughing about marriage and aging and the things that sometimes cause grief, it’s a good thing. Because you have to laugh. If not you’ll just end up crying about it.”
View more at beckygottsegen.com. In December, Becky Gottsegen will be profiled on LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, December 14, at 8:30 pm or Saturday, December 15, at 5:30 pm across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.
