Fascinated with revealing structure, Judith describes her drawing process as building from the inside out. Yet it also seems to me that she takes bodies apart, separating linkages, unhooking them from time and place, a bit like a dictionary where words, removed from conversation, have their roots revealed. Judith depicts the knuckles of a hand with such architectural rigor that they look like barnacles or beehives. These are not Emersonian correspondence, tending toward mysticism, but an emphasis on the thing itself, pressed into consciousness, dug down into complication, refusing to be waylaid or appropriated.

My childhood home was surrounded by a Chicago suburb being built in the farmland. We kids played in the half-built houses, in and out of the studs. In my older farmhouse, my parents were knocking down walls and exposing the architectural bones, shifting the underlying framework, and building back up to the surface. I was transfixed by the process; I didn't like things finished and cleaned up.

Judith Roode (B.A., Grinnell College; M.F.A., University of Iowa) has exhibited her figure drawings in invitational exhibitions at such institutions as: The Women's Interact Center, New York City; Art Institute of Boston; Cincinnati Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and in a Kentucky Arts Commission traveling exhibition. Her work is published in Nathan Goldstein's 5th edition of The Art of Responsive Drawing, A Drawing Handbook. Her work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Weisman Art Museum, Tweed Museum and the Minnesota Historical Society. In 1992 she retired as a Professor from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design due to a debilitating illness.