23 BUCKS COUNTY WOMAN
“I usually cast my work in bronze, my preferred medium, and also fabricate in bronze wire. Bronze is a very rich material, a very flexible medium. You can assemble things, cast them, and then burn them out. It has more intrinsic beauty for me than steel or aluminum.”
The artist’s first public art commission was Ball of Leaves, a cast bronze sphere wrapped in leaves that Miller McCue patinated with a dense, blue-green finish. The sculpture, awarded the Environmental Sculpture Commission in 1994 for the Salomon Brothers, Inc. headquarters at 7 World Trade Center, was destroyed September 11. What has survived is the smaller scale maquette in the artist’s own collection. Ball of Leaves, a cohesive composition suggesting growth and abundance, exists in counterpoint to her Ball of Thorns, No. 2, a painted cast bronze piece that evokes chaos barely held in check.
While Miller McCue independently explores her own ideas, “I like working with a site-specific focus.” Pursuing a commission “challenges you to go deeper into yourself than you might otherwise do.”
Many have seen Miller McCue’s Haystacks in the Field, No. 1, a Michener Art Museum temporary outdoor sculpture installation in 2000, sited on the grounds of the First National Bank of Newtown at Bridge Street and Route 202 in New Hope in 2006. Dramatic not only for their size and ingenuity, the of series of haystacks—made of steel wool over painted steel armature—weathered, exposing new colors and textures as the untreated steel wool disintegrated.
Miller McCue is currently working on a project for the Adkins Arboretum in Ridgeley, Md., creating her vision of large bronze screen dragonflies floating in ponds. Bronze wire comes into play for the Village Green Sculpture on the Green Bi-Annual Invitational Exhibition in Cashiers, N.C.; Nesting Ground features seven large nests to be installed in the flora around the grounds.
Looking ahead, she is interested in doing a linear series of more open, spatial structures that play with positive and negative space. “This is something I want to go back to soon, large linear structures for outside and smaller ones on a more intimate, gallery-sized scale.”
That means Miller McCue will soon be building again.
Elizabeth Miller McCue is represented by Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pa.; Highlands Art Gallery in Chester, N.J.; and art4business in Philadelphia.
She is a member of the Pennsylvania State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the National Association of Women Artists in New York; Phi Beta Kappa; and a Founding Member of the Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County. For more on the artist, visit www.ElizabethMcCue.com.
Story by Anne Biggs
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