Judith Fox-Fliesser is an artist living and working in Saint Augustine, Florida. She was born, grew up, studied and worked in Brooklyn, N.Y. After a career as an artist in New York City, working as a graphic artist and a sculptor, she studied medicine and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, practicing in New York City and then in Saint Augustine. Similarly, her husband, Jeffrey Fliesser, had a career as an artist, in his case as a performing and studio musician in New York City, and then studied medicine and became a psychiatrist.
After her years practicing psychoanalysis, Fox-Fliesser decided to return to her work as an artist full time. She was able to build a studio on their property large enough for her to work big and to have a kiln to fire large sculptures.
Her first major project on returning to sculpture is a series of 9 heads which draw from the time spent sitting with patients and reading their faces to help her understand (in addition to their words) what was going on inside of them. Additionally, since 9/11, during which she was still living in New York City, she has been fascinated by the realization of how hard it is to know what is inside people from the limited time we spend looking at their faces. This is made harder by our reluctance to stare at people. So here in this project, is a chance to stare as long as one may like. She set out to create heads which depicted a particular feeling within her. Each head comes from a different feeling. What has emerged from people’s responses to these heads, is a realization that people are affected very differently from how she expected them to be.
She has named the group, I and Thou, after Martin Buber’s seminal work, in which he describes how one can relate to the beings in this world either as something we make use or to relate as one being to another. She has attempted to put forth in clay in these heads, something that is inside of her for people to relate to from what is inside of them.
These heads were created from her imagination, drawing from people who have been significant in her life, either personally or as iconic figures in the world, past and present.
Fox-Fliesser works either by close observation of nature as seen in her life drawings or from her imagination, as she did in the heads.
Sources for her work are a lifelong and continuing study of anatomy, the art of other times and places as well as of contemporary artists and an engagement with issues of social justice.
She works spontaneously, allowing forms to emerge in the clay or on paper. The limits of the materials she uses are metaphors for what we can and cannot do as physical beings.
She hopes to convey to the people alive today and for those who come after her what it is like for her to be alive today.