“On the Fall Equinox” - For Ursula von Rydingsvard
October 28, 2026
“On the Fall Equinox” - For Ursula von Rydingsvard
By Peter Halstead
An old leaf fallen
On the land
Brings its veins
And poisons down,
And on the other hand,
Adds some pollen
To the ground.
September 22, 2024, Rosebud
Tippet Rise celebrates and remembers artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, who passed away on October 27, 2026 at the age of 84.
We were honored to host Ursula in 2024 for the installation of her work Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013/14), a sculpture that deeply resonates with the surrounding landscape and expansive views across the plateaus and canyons of Tippet Rise, and far beyond.
Ursula’s filigree on her Bronze Bowl with Lace was fabricated inch by inch by Ursula, Jack, and Mike at UAP in the Hudson Valley, after which Ursula applied her special patina, which changed the character of the bronze with the seasons and the light.
The rough cuts she made in blocks of wood were smoothed and polished into the immense bronze constructions which took her and UAP a year to fabricate. The art lay not only in her rebellion against the domesticity implied by her enormous vases, but in the intricate assembly processes in the immense heat of the kilns and forges in the foundry, which took stamina and dedication.
The paintings of Courbet and the poems of Keats were politically forbidden criticisms of the new Iron Age, harkening back to a Virgilian agrarian society that was being replaced by belching smokestacks and steam engines, and Ursula, in all her grace, energy, and compassion, at the end of her life embedded this sly castigation of industry into her ironic metal giants, using manufacturing techniques to contradict an architecture which transformed cottages and barns into the metallic sterility of office cubicles and impersonal skyscrapers.
Ursula absolutely loved her friends, and all of us at Tippet Rise were so blessed to have loved her back at the last possible minute.
Peter and Cathy Halstead