“What if?” For Pine Plains artist Kirsten Westphal, that question fuels “Prunings,” her first exhibition in more than two decades. On view at BES Millerton through Oct. 23, the show reveals how drawing, carving, and color serve as experiments in pushing material and imagination to their limits.
In the front room of BES Millerton, a shop and gallery space on Main Street, carved wooden forms stand in defiance of gravity. If you look long enough, they seem to breathe. Each sculpture carries a definitive presence; together, they gather into a kind of chorus, fashioned from once-living matter that, in their playfulness, seems to hold on to the essence of life — of creation itself. For Westphal, the works are the result of an accelerated year of making, and of giving herself permission to surprise.
“I had sketches and ideas I’d been sitting on,” she said during a recent walkthrough. “When Meg and Erica invited me to show here, it lit a fire. I thought, why not finally see where these pieces could go?”
The answer is a collection of hand-carved sculptures, each cut from locally sourced wood, much of it from her own yard in Pine Plains. Some pieces are left to reveal their natural grain and knots; others are interrupted by planes of ultramarine or flashes of vermilion. Color, she said, is a new chapter for her.
“For years, I believed pigment had to be built into the material, otherwise it was superficial,” she said. “Then I painted directly on the wood and it just started vibrating.”
That vibration is literal and optical. A blue disk painted onto a flat surface reads like an opening — a portal the eye can slip through. On a curved form, the same blue creates the illusion of negative space cut into solid matter.
Her drawings, too, echo this tension between control and chance. Made in ink wash, they track ideas that emerge too quickly for the slower pace of carving. “Drawing is expedient,” she said. “It records possibilities before they vanish.” Some of the drawings serve as studies for sculpture; others become their own experiments, where a bleed of ink stopped by the edge of a wet silhouette creates a contained burst of energy.
At BES Millerton, which opened its gallery wing earlier this year, Westphal’s work feels both elemental and playful. “When we first visited her studio, it was joyful, like stepping into a space where objects had their own personalities,” said Meg Musgrove, who runs the space with Erica Recto. “We wanted people here to feel that same thrill.”
Recto described the show as “compelling and neighborly,” pointing to the use of local wood. “It feels like it comes right out of this place,” she said.
The title “Prunings” suggests what Westphal calls “the creative logic of cutting back” — the idea that from what is pared away, new growth emerges. The sculptures, stacked and staggered, often look precarious but balanced; the drawings, quick but deliberate, capture the flicker of invention.
“It’s about staying engaged,” Westphal said. “Always asking, what if? That question never runs out.”