Opening Reception: Friday, December 3, 5-8 pm
Meet the Artists: Saturday, December 11, 12-3 pm

Beginning November 27, Fountain Street Gallery will exhibit “Confluence” featuring the work of Denise Driscoll and Sara Fine-Wilson. Driscoll’s paintings and Fine-Wilson’s sculptures balance meticulous craft with purposeful play to explore the precarious complexity of life and relationship. Both artists use processes of accumulation and assembly that enable complex forms to emerge from simple parts. Working with clay, Fine-Wilson combines chunks, slabs and wheel-thrown elements to build monochromatic gestural sculptures. Driscoll layers brightly colored overlapping ovals and the gaps between them to build ambiguous spaces. In both cases, the confluence of these many parts creates work that invites extended gazing.

Denise Driscoll works from the premise that all living things are connected in an intricate mesh of being, yet each occupies the center of their own world. These simultaneous centers of lived experience swirl within and around us, piercing, enveloping and permeating with or without our notice. Holding questions about symbiosis, coexistence and sentience while working, Driscoll grasps at the awareness that we live in a clash of porous and conflicting worlds. In her Kinship series,
highly saturated complementary colors create dynamic, mesmerizing spaces without a focal point. Each painting becomes an imaginary map of exchange: a playful, hopeful vision of our interconnected lives.

Driscoll has an MFA from Lesley Art + Design, where she also teaches. She has been reviewed in Artscope magazine and featured in The Boston Globe. She has held solo exhibitions in commercial and university galleries throughout New England. She participated in the inaugural AREA CODE Art Fair in 2020 and has been included in numerous group shows and art fairs. Her work is collected internationally. Driscoll works from her studio in Norwood, MA and is a Core Member of Fountain Street.

Sara Fine-Wilson’s ceramic sculpture begins with gestures like folding, twisting, stretching and dropping. These forms are created intuitively and assembled in ways that investigate the edge between balance and chaos. Fine-Wilson creates repeating forms in different scales that all encompass a similar gesture or directionality. She then connects them and creates a larger version, which amplifies the initial gesture. The pieces exhibited in “Confluence” are twisted, torqued and inverted in ways that explore the idea of how form can be both disrupted and connected together.

Fine-Wilson is an artist and teacher who works primarily in sculpture. She attended Maryland Institute College of Art, Massachusetts College of Art, and University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She spent a year as a resident artist at Worcester Center for Crafts. She currently teaches ceramics and design. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums including Fitchburg Art Museum and Danforth Museum of Art. Her studio is located in Millbury, MA. She is a Core Member of Fountain Street.

Gallery hours are 12-4 pm, Thursday-Sunday