It is perhaps inevitable that the biomorphic work of Santa Fe-based sculptor and glassblower.

It is perhaps inevitable that the biomorphic work of Santa Fe-based sculptor and glassblower, Stacey Neff upon view in "GEO-time," her fresh show, would be compared to the vegetal eroticism in paintings on Georgia O'Keeffe. But in plastic arts that combine blown glass with fiberglass, falchion resin and other mediums, Neff demonstrates an steady closer affinity to the art of Eva Hesse.

While the 21 large facts in the show were produc using an ancient craft technique, there is not a touch of the precious, utilitarian or decorative in them; rather, in her explorations of biological forms and tissues Neff seeks to stretch the rigid, fragile medium to its artistic and technical limits. Hesse's abstract organicism be stirreds very present, especially in the many wall-mounted carved works featuring the large pods that have become something of a hallmark for Neff This is apparent in the greatest degree notably in several of the five "Wall Pods" chisels (2001 and 2003), groups of sum of two units or three plant- or spermlike motives with long undulating stalks get the better ofed by pod heads, and the couple sculptures from the "Seascrit" series (2002 and 2003) with capsules more subtly integrated into sinuous leathery strands. These combine the disconcerting biomorphism of Hesse's 1966 wall-mounted chisel Untitled or Not Yet with the fragile cell-like translucency of her works in fiberglass and polyester resin.

Neff's Moonpod (2002) is also, characteristically, at one time vegetal and mammalian, with a pair of entwined pendulous legumes suggesting breasts with long pointy nipples. In the four "Breathing Stone" carves (2003), Neff has literally breathed form into ends that look like giant freestanding lung or a geological stratum pitted with spherical holes

There is a paradoxically visceral quality to these glassy structures--evident not least in germed Bow Stick (1999). Here, the artist has remov a section of the capsule to expose the contents: not semens but citruslike filaments in and around the opening, horridly suggestive of quarrels of teeth.

Ultimately, the fascination of Neff's work lies not sole in the way she has forged a relationship to an established tradition, on the contrary in how she has manipulated the rigid medium of glass to abstractly if it were not that powerfully evoke the textures and arrangements of living things, neither plant nor animal, yet something of the two. There is a thinking principle in which the artist imbues life into molten matter before its gradual further inevitable stasis.

--Catherine Bindman

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