By ALICIA FAXON
Women Artists News, Fall 1989
Prilla Brackett's exhibition, "Waterworks" at the Somerville Museum was a dialog between rocky
coast and fluid sea, movable and immovable, massive form and the dissolution of form. It was also a
dialog between representing and evoking, careful delineation of form and play of brushstroke,
abstract versus concrete. Although rocky shores, of Greek islands and the New England coast, are
arenas for this dialog, depicting specific locales is not the end of the artist's quest, rather the
beginning.
Brackett has had a long-time interest in landscape, but constantly tests the limits of representation
against a painterly exploration of texture and stroke. "Waterworks" is particularly interesting as
Brackett's experiment with new ways of presenting her work, here in a vertical triptych, Between
#5, in oil pastel, oil stick and acrylic wash on paper. She also works with sets of diptychs in oil, which
permit rhythmic patterns of formal juxtapositions, but here has not totally solved the conflict of
flattened patterns versus three-dimentional form.
Water is both an opportunity and a metaphor for the artist to pose rigid, controlled forms against
changing, reflective flows of water. Both the pastels and the oils achieve some exciting results. The
titles, Becoming, Emerging, Revelations and Between, suggest that the artist is considering problems
of flux and constancy in her own life, as well as her representations. The dichotomies of personal and
impersonal are also latent in this work. Not all the experiments succeed, but the artist is wiling to
take risks of techniques and vision.