Tip Toland: Melt, the Figure in Clay December 18, 2008

Much like life, Tip Toland's work can be poetic, passionate, and now and again, unsettling. Her incredibly life-like sculptures -- laboriously constructed of clay, stoneware, synthetic hair and paint -- capture bodies at their most vulnerable: naked, aging, exposed to the ravages of time and the elements. Yet at the heart of her work there is compassion, playfulness, and above all, acceptance of self.