Robert Brady at the Fuller Craft Museum

This exhibition of Berkeley-based Robert Brady's carved and assembled wooden figures was organized by the Palo Alto Art Center in 2006 and traveled to two other California venues and to Washington, D.C. before arriving in Massachusetts. It appeared at a museum devoted to crafts probably because the California-based artist sometimes works in clay and began his expression of masklike heads and attenuated bodies in that material. He fell into woodcarving when he discovered how well it served the making of his fragile, oddly proportioned, sometimes winged beings. He was known to fashion heads too big to be supported by clay bodies, which makes it ironic that in these wood sculptures the heads are often tiny balls, set without necks onto broad, blocky torsos with spindly arms and legs. The figures, which stand or kneel or sit or fall or fly, range in height from about 15 inches to around 8 feet and have a crude, folk-art-like directness.

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Brady also paints and makes prints, and he has over the years produced diverse ceramics, including vessels of utilitarian sizes and others 6 feet tall; abstract structures made of clay rods; and, more recently, large boulderlike forms linked to his sense of the sublime in the arid Western landscape. But he is best known for figures, which he began to make in 1980. As a teenager Brady suffered a debilitating arthritic illness, and his figures have often implied vulnerability and incapacity. But many of them equally convey a spiritual or shamanistic quality. The tall figure in Confirmation (1988) carries a Gothic tabernacle on its head and shoulders; several works are titled Angel; and For the King's Journey (1993) consists of a pair of (wooden) clamshell wings, brilliant blue on the outside and golden on the inside, centering on a rudimentary macelike figure topped with three stacked green balls.

Other figures, however, seem less spiritual than neurotic. There are fantastically elongated and intensely inward-focused females in slowed or stopped motion; their positions bring to mind swimming, diving or gymnastics. Plumb IV (2001), for example, is a wall-hung figure in a jackknife pose that would imply diving were she not wearing a long dress; the alternative interpretation is that she has closed herself in a psychological sense. Other figures in the show incorporate basketry that alludes to emotional containment; there are heads attached to enormous combs that seem more like barriers than grooming aids. Brady walks an odd and thin line between hopeful and hopeless in works that are as austere as Giacometti's but with a greater tactile tenderness.

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