Lee Bontecou (b. 1931)

"Following her retirement from teaching in 1991, Bontecou completed work on some of the sculptures she had begun during the previous decade, expanding a vocabulary she had first explored in the late 1970s. A body of these works consists of small sculptures rendered in porcelain, made of interlocking parts that when pieced together evoke miniscule and mysterious landscapes or galaxies – highly delicate and intricately, even obsessively, detailed. She continues to make all aspects of her own work, firing the porcelain she uses as orbs and linkages within her newest sculptures, welding her own metal frameworks, and laboriously building up and embellishing, over a period of months or even years, the armature of her elaborate sculptures" (E. A. T. Smith, Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, New Haven, CT, 2008, p. 178).