Lorri Acott makes figurative sculpture from a studio in Colorado. Her figures are elongated — long legs, outstretched arms, no faces, no clothing — reduced to the grammar of human gesture so that the gesture itself carries the full weight of meaning. She works in paperclay first, building the ceramic form from which a mold is made and the bronze cast. She keeps the cracks that come from the fired ceramic in the bronze. That process shows in the finished surface: it is not polished, it remembers how it was made.
In Lorri Acott landscape, this monumental carved eagle, rendered in dark bronze and cream-toned stone, occupies the compositional foreground with aggressive verticality that disrupts the horizontal calm of the surrounding landscape. The artist's use of negative space—the hollow silhouette cut into the lighter stone—creates visual tension between the figure's mass and its penetration, drawing the viewer's eye upward while the scattered mulch and peripheral rocks establish a grounded, almost domestic setting. The juxtaposition of this mythic symbol against ordinary trees and manicured grass raises an unresolved question about whether monumentality confers meaning or merely amplifies scale. Her public commissions operate at monumental scale. A 22-foot Spirit of Renewal stands in Phoenix, Arizona. An 11-foot Conversation with Myself was installed at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. Peace, commissioned by the City of Greeley, was selected by the Michigan ACLU as art to change the world in 2014 and honored by the World Citizens Artists organization in 2015. With her husband Adam Schultz she co-founded Dream Big Sculpture, specializing in large-scale public artwork. Her work is in private collections in the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan.
The works at JG bring this language to studio scale. Mother’s Day, the top piece at holds two figures in the specific posture of that relationship — the gesture legible without a face, without clothing, without anything but the position of a body in relation to another. Hope Sings, Fearless, Beloved — the titles name emotional states; the bronze figures make them physical. The small bronzes hold the same quality of casting as the monumental pieces. The gesture is the same at twelve inches as at twenty-two feet.
Sculpting opens up a portal to that place in me that is the subconscious. The work comes through me and says something meaningful and profound.
