The smell of rugosa roses swirls in Elizabeth Ostrander’s sculpture garden where curving paths wind through the daisies and lupines, and lush trees stand as a boundary.
Mystically peeking from between the bee-laden flowers are the sculptures: mostly women, mostly mystic, mostly joyous, seeming almost to grow from the very ground itself.
“I favor that totemic shape,” Ostrander said on a recent tour. “It has a spirit, a power. They are almost rising up.”
Ostrander, 66, works mostly in clay — her fingers pushing and pulling, smoothing and shaping tiny bits of clay into what she calls “soft realities.”
As she manipulates the medium, shoulders appear. Lips pucker. Eyes open.
Once a sculpture is completed, Ostrander creates a patina by applying layers of acrylic glaze, which she sometimes combines with sand, rusty metal bits, paper and fabric collage.
“The women come out of me,” she said, “but they take on their own identity.”
She calls them “her tribe,” and they are quite often positioned in movements similar to classical ballet, which Ostrander studied and was passionate about for years.
Whether they are mermaids reclining in a patch of buttercups, or women with faces upturned to the sky, or necks stretched sideways as if looking around a corner, each sculpture appears strangely familiar. It’s as if Ostrander has created a friend, a companion for the viewer. They look like your mother, your friend, yourself.
“I love the face,” she said. “From our infancy we are drawn to faces. When I’m looking at your face, I’m creating a relationship, a dance with who you are.”
Ostrander’s women often have elongated features, a technique she borrowed from Amedeo Modigliani — an Italian bohemian painter and sculptor.
By rising the neck, extending the nose, exaggerating the lips and the spread of the cheekbones, she said, “It opens the face up so you can enter; so you can move into the face.”
“The faces are the focal points of awareness for people,” she said. “They are joyous, at peace. They have a centeredness and a contentment.”
Ostrander is a sprite of a woman who fell in love with sculpture at age 17. She studied with Jose DeCreeft, a Spanish-born American sculptor, in New York City and then attended the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. She later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, but it wasn’t until moving to Eastport 25 years ago that she said she refined her style.
Ostrander said she pulls inspiration from the European and Asian gardens.
“You walk through them as if you are on a journey and then you come upon a shrine. But there is such a humanness to it,” she said.
Ostrander said she draws spiritual inspiration from her garden, with its messages of life and renewal.
The sculptures carry the messages of peace and love, she said.
“These are the motivations to get through life. We need those parts of ourselves.”
She said visitors often appreciate seeing her art in a garden setting, where the sculptures seem to almost come alive yet are enchantingly mysterious and mystical.
“This type of presentation encourages a connection with the art,” she said.
Guests can touch the wings of the guardian mother, feel the scales on the head of a mermaid.
There is a palpable shift, however, upon stepping into her home studio adjacent to the garden.
Ostrander’s studio is as different from her garden as bread and water: both necessary for her survival, but feeding differing parts of her soul.
The studio is primal to her — skulls gather on a top shelf, huge hunks of clay are in mid-shape, tools, wires, and wood are being assembled into a totem.
An antique sideboard holds a collection of alien toys (“I sometimes need a support group,” she joked) and taped in one corner of a large mirror is a piece of white paper with big black letters: FOCUS.
Creating is a journey, Ostrander said.
“You can end up with a masterpiece or end up in a swamp and be asking yourself ‘How did I get here?’ Then it becomes about perseverance.”
It seems natural that her work has spilled from the chaotic, eclectic studio, into the harmonious, peaceful garden — a complete metamorphosis.
“I’ve always been moved by the garden, its opulence and enthusiasm. The garden is more of the joyous aspect of the feminine,” Ostrander said. “It is soft.”
Right now, while the garden blooms with summer flowers, Ostrander said it is filled with joy. “But it is impermanent. Winter will come.”
This shifting landscape mirrors life, she said.
“You need to center yourself, to be present in this moment. It is fleeting,” she said.
Ostrander’s sculpture garden is located at 83 Clark St. in Eastport, just off Route 189. Her website is www.ostranderart.com and her works are being exhibited at the Eastport Art Center, the Eastport Gallery, Breakwater Gallery in Eastport, Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill, Harbor Square Gallery in Rockland, The Gallery on Chase Hill in Kennebunkport and Cocco & Salem Imagine Art in Key West, Fla.