An Intimate Cosmos

For mixed-media artist Elspeth Halvorsen (born in 1929), a lifetime spent flying just under the radar has enabled her the freedom to fashion her own world—or in this case, her own worlds. Halvorsen’s genius lies in creating suspended and freestanding, self-contained, three-dimensional stage sets she calls “boxes.” At their most abstract, a Halvorsen box opens onto a timeless universe, a primal memory as experienced under the night sky from a faraway shore.

For more than a half-century, her visual frame of reference has been the Outer Cape. Yet her work is far from evoking a regionalist sensibility. The stripped-down sense of place located in Halvorsen’s boxes reveals nature as iconic spiritual sanctuary: sky and sea, moon and tides, the horizon line, light and shadow. These are illusions fashioned from found and carved assemblages incorporating horseshoe crabs, plaster female torsos, gemstones, hanging chains, ladders, swings, and burnished aluminum.

Edward Hopper would understand. So would Emily Dickinson. Two Elspeth Halvorsen shows in Provincetown that opened on the cusp of summer are cause for celebration.

Both exhibitions explore Halvorsen’s visionary oeuvre over several decades, emphasizing aspects of her densely poetic, dreamlike approach to the physical and the spiritual, as filtered through memory. Often contemporary in narrative content, she does not shy away from social and political issues such as ecological disaster, war and disruption. Nor does Halvorsen work in the ironic mode. Her best tone is magisterial, identifying the cosmic in nature’s cycle of creation, decay and renewal.

In her early twenties the soft-spoken Halvorsen met well-known figurative painter Tony Vevers (1926–2008) when both were on painting trips to Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine. The couple made Provincetown their home from the mid-1950s, becoming an integral part of the art colony. They bought their house, complete with studio space, from artist Mark Rothko. Halvorsen was soon showing alongside the freewheeling crowd (whose original members included Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, and Jan Müller) gathered around Provincetown’s legendary Sun Gallery. She has been showing consistently since, in New England and New York.

Halvorsen’s singular, visionary pieces were seen in Image in the Box: From Cornell to Contemporary at the Hollis Taggart Galleries in Manhattan (2009), positioning her constructions with those by Joseph Cornell, Pierre Roy, Maureen McCabe, Lucas Samaras, and others. Her work was also included in The Tides of Provincetown, which traveled to the Cape Cod Museum of Art in 2012. About her work generally, Halvorsen has said, “The spaces can be imagined as visions of stops on a journey to another place, of spiritual peace. I try to depict a moment, so as to keep it from disappearing forever.”

The impeccably crafted Heaven is a vertical construction framed by a crenellated wooden box, lit by an interior light. An etched view of Parisian parks, rivers, arched Romanesque bridges and a blue-gray sky lines the back of the box. In the foreground, Halvorsen has positioned a female torso, its limbs foreshortened, riding a tortoise carapace. A luminous pearl, set like an offering before the classical figure, draws the eye skyward to a second pearl, now the moon. The arched outer frame and softly rounded shell echo the scallops of the bridge. Time and Silence presents Halvorsen’s cosmology at its most austere—mirrored reflections, pearls, chains, double aluminum circles—always with the knowledge that the mutable world must ultimately bend into time’s embrace.

With these two Provincetown shows, one in a museum and the other in her nearby gallery, we can absorb the fullness of Elspeth Halvorsen’s highly sophisticated yet intensely personal vision.

Susan Rand Brown, Ph.D., is a writer and literature teacher based in Provincetown, MA and Hartford, CT.