Artist Statement
Employing a form of dream logic, my work examines themes of beauty, humor and horror. Situated between warrior princess and sturdy milkmaid, my hybrid, feminine figures playfully enact feminist revenge fantasies as they lounge, bend or contort into suggestive puzzles. Unbound by convention they are sexy, angry, ugly and funny. Amply endowed, but often with withering or oversized appendages, these figures question the line between alien and real, human and animal, self and other. They both seduce and offend.
My earlier work was avowedly abstract. Although the work started with a visual reference, either from life or a photograph, my paintings were distinctly ambiguous. They combined graphic compositions with delicate painterliness. My path to painting the figure began six years ago after moving back into my childhood home to care for and, subsequently, witness my mother's death from cancer. The chemotherapy had both strange and beautiful effects on her body. Her eyelashes became so thick they looked like spider legs and her nails grew in, strong and pink, sometimes bleeding at the cuticle. We joked about her "cancer beauty routine". This period revealed (the body) to me as a stubborn yet transformative object. It was a tableau of beauty and terror. Confronted with the strange unbelievability of death I was compelled to see the humor and pathos in having a body, as well as the futility in hating that body or trying to control it.
My paintings are oil on canvas, although I also make reliefs and frames for my paintings out of wood. I studied painting in the intensely modernist tradition. This bred a deep respect and love for the craft of painting. My natural sense of defiance helps me to undermine that reverence in numerous material, stylistic and conceptual ways. My tools include brushes, pallet knives, fingernails and sandpaper. My process is intuitive and direct. The construction of frames for my work combines my longtime interest in decorative arts and architecture with my desire to work in three dimensions.
