15 October 2005 14:31 PM

To get from deer to bears to female bodies, a process one might call sympathetic metamorphosis needs be employed. And such is the transformation that takes place in Donelle Estey’s gentle ink and watercolor drawings, dreamy totemesque musings on the closeness of animals and women and gingerroot and coral. In one blood-red pairing, a caribou head grows from atop a lady’s. In another, faint brown like oxidized blood, a tangle of roots and abstractly fishy plant forms grows as if antlers from atop a large creature, part bear, part seal, all female. The pictures, taken all together, speak of another world, an Adam-less Eden where curvy forms are not snakelike at all.

—Lori Waxman