palimpsest
Something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form…
Much of my work, as in this painting Forbearance, 2012 is rendered from multiple sources and applied in layers of silkscreen prints and paint that speak to each other over centuries in parallel time on the canvas. In Forbearance the bottom layer is a pattern taken from Japanese blue and white kimono cloth woven by women in unique patterns that were passed down through families. Interspersed (via computer manipulation) in the traditional pattern are military map symbols. The woman posing with her back exposed references photographs of women whose backs were burned through their kimonos after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dark red silkscreen image is taken from Gustave Dore’s series of engravings about the Crusades. This particular detail was blown up many times and digitally manipulated before it was burned onto a silkscreen and printed. The original engraving documents mothers watching their children leave to fight the “Children’s Crusade.” All of the children perished on the ill-fated mission. All readings of the work—filled with mixed-emotions and heartache and misunderstanding—are valid.
word games
A studio challenge for myself.
In 2019, after a longer hiatus from work in the studio, I needed some structure to prompt new work. I created a set of rules for myself - an art game of sorts. The rules were as follows: I had one studio session to create a collage based on three words and a phrase drawn randomly from categories I created. The word categories were as follows: The Lords Prayer chopped into fragmentary clauses, physical states of being, aesthetic phrases/adjectives, and nouns (things I like to think about: rocks, rivers, trees, the moon, animals etc.) The words are all things that have a history in my work. These constraints challenged me to illustrate meaning out of random juxtaposition. I was allowed to represent these words in literal, figural, or abstract ways. One last rule was I could only use existing prints, drawings, materials in the studio. This work’s words were: strenuous, liquid, moon, lead us not into temptation.
women’s work
Women, men and people of all genders await an alternative to patriarchy. My thinking on this front is complicated: abiding in and dreaming outside of patriarchy, the art world, organized religion, and historic gender roles. I will write more about this in time, but suffice to say the concepts about women’s work that resonate in my artwork are about the domestic spaces in which women have been able to seize some power. Fraught and dysfunctional as this realm might be, it is where we have lived.
poems and prayers
Lines of poems, prayers, and songs swim in my subconscious and often float up to the surface.
This collage is one of four in the series, Where There Is, 2020. The work is based upon St. Francis’s famous prayer - reduced down to four lines and images. The source materials are from civil war era engravings of Sherman’s march, frontier battles, a storming of the ramparts by the knights templar, ink drawings made during a zen ink drawing workshop, and prints of antique lace. The work examines the perpetual desire to be better than we find ourselves and the search for divine intervention into the human condition of perpetual strife.
Let me sow, O Woods, where there is.
In dying, O Waters, to love.
In giving, O Fires, to console
In pardoning, O Rocks, to understand