RECENT WORK

relearning to speak

A return to a body of work interrupted

 

My recent work is a mindful and at times playful integration of the material around me that picks up right where it left off in 2009 after a 15 year artistic hiatus.  As a woman, an artist, a wife, a mother, a daughter, and student of life, I have a complex story to tell which is reflected in the piecing together of my work. Much like a quilt, these pieces are part of a beautiful tapestry that is life.

 

This was my exit from -and now my long yearned for return to- artistic expression and storytelling.  

 

How does one juggle the organized yet beautiful chaos of raising children, maintaining a career, a marriage, showing up when it matters, and retain any sense of identity or sense of self, let alone sanity? The answer is that we do not always juggle it all that well. In fact, it is quite rare.  Things get messy, spill, hit the floor, and break. We lose ourselves, sometimes others,  and our minds at times. We say goodbye to certain things to make room for others, but hopefully are afforded the opportunity to visit them when there is space to do so.

For fleeting moments when creating, I can be everything that I am; all of my selves can coexist in a state of delicate and harmonious simultaneity. I am pieced together and whole. 

 

Bleach, paper, acrylic, and lipstick are the primary media of choice in these paintings. They are a thoughtful meditation using an alluring formula of lush and corrosive materials being torn apart and pieced back together in a way that I understood. They represent, in my eyes, the multifaceted  nature of being a woman. 

 

The heart of my smaller studies was in the media itself, but in my larger works the process becomes the emphasis. In the destructive acts of ripping, tearing, mending, collaging, reworking, and feverish mark making, I found a way to work that embraces the way my mind operates. I am cycling between balancing chaos and order as I wrestle with the conflicts brought about by womanhood and motherhood in a world that doesn’t always play well with our needs. 

 

There is something extremely cathartic in the destruction of something that might bring anguish before it can be pieced together again and made right and whole and rebirthed into something completely  new, resilient, and inherently beautiful.