“The Skin She Lives In”: The Skin Ego in the Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard

Ursula von Rydingsvard has said that, when she was a child, the goal of her life was to “die in a state of grace” (Phillips, 2011, p. 28). Ursula was born at the height of the Second World War in 1942 in Deensen, Germany. Ursula's parents had been exiled from their homeland after the German occupation of Poland. At the end of the war her family lived for five years in eight different postwar refugee camps for displaced Poles. Her Ukrainian-born father worked at farming, while her Polish mother helped sustain basic family needs in clothing, cooking, and caring for their seven children. Ursula remembers this period as a time filled with struggle and austerity, but also as one of deep propinquity within her family. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1950. The circumstances of her parents' farm labor in these camps and the imaginative imprint of the raw wooden textures of barracks indelibly imbedded von Rydingsvard in the material world. Yet some of her most compelling memories from childhood capture the fabric of her devotional aesthetic and her delicate cravings. Catholic liturgy offered dignity, repetition, and above all the “intrusion of grace” into a mundane world (pp. 27-29). As she recounts in a recent interview:

The Church was extremely important. Even though it was another barracks, it was bigger than the one we lived in. It always had a cross on it. And inside, it was clean. A tremendous effort was made to make it feel special, to make it feel as though there was something of great

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consequence in there. Its [sic] the only place that you saw white linen with a little bit of embroidery around it. It's the only place where you saw clean clothes that were the vestments that the priest would wear and altar boys would wear. I remember being very attentive to the part of the mass in which the priest holds the chalice and he has a little board that he puts on top of it and then a beautifully clean, white folded, ir