artist statement
| ARTIST STATEMENT |
| “The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God.” - Hermann Hesse My current body of work finds itself inhabiting and inquiring within the spaces of the American South and the Baltic Sea. An interest in ancestral anthropology draws these preoccupations together: in the immigrant's America, roots are often half-imagined, conjured, concealed. I employ many modes of artmaking as a toolbox for exhumation and excavation. Working on paper fascinates me. Placing marks on paper through varied means, with galvanic effects on my perceptions. A picture can change a place. A word reconstrues. There is a friction to putting them on paper: a strata like skin, that can be written with words, codes, colors, patterns, stories, senses. I find myself working in the soil of places that have known epic human catalclysm...which generations of my family worked sometimes to create, and sometimes to escape. I grew up in the rural South amidst the half-told narratives that testify to poverty and injustice. Where it takes generation upon generation to dismantle the fear and mystery. Survival is a form of defiance. It takes a prism to reveal all bandwidths of light. Places that have known cataclysmic struggle or suffering are possessed. We all own them, and they own us, for better or worse. For the surviving immigrant to go back - to plantation, to concentration camp , to a forbidden lost homeland - often takes us beyond our sensory parameters. We are literally at a loss. These places often defy words, cry for silence, and the eyes must suffice. To be rendered speechless often places a brush in the hand. And when it is too painful to see, and we avert our eyes, then we listen for the words that will bring understanding. All of these generating and degenerating sites bear epic histories that in every case have radically altered the nature of human and ecological existence. Like art itself, these places – and their histories - remain fiercely alive, and shift and warp depending upon perspective. A disorienting grace resounds within the fractures of birth and destruction. In locations with particularly painful histories, a certain resurrection of beauty seems to me both absurd and essential, and often unexpectedly powerful. Since my visual art is semi- or non-representational, and my textual work increasingly poetic and abstract, these iconic and socially inscribed sites are often unrecognizable. They are dislodged from their familiar representations and contexts. Visual and textual poetic dissociation strips them of their traditional stories and symbols, dislocates them from accepted commentary, and provides an opportunity for new growth. As a result, I believe that the emotional intensity often reveals itself more vividly, perhaps because through erasing the identifiers of recognition, the chaos inherent in these places and times is dispelled into an intensity of beauty and light. Ruins are - in essence - sites of partially destroyed memory. And like memories, they are events over time. With historic ruins, it is possisble to actually observe as the human hand loses its long held grasp on the structures and stories it has built – places inexorably return to their ancient organic origins and facts become lost or legend. Yet the sense of change somehow remains, in the air, or the soil, or the light. PHOTOGRAPHY I view my photographic work as holograms that evoke the multiple times, spaces and dimensions of “constructed places” – indeed, the derivation of holography is "whole writing/drawing." In exploring the physical lifespan of an inscribed place (essentially, its wavefront), I work with the nuances of the cameras themselves, and with exposure of the films, to pick up the interference and diffractions. This is quite a tangible event for me and the camera and the film, and I think the resulting images reveal a great many intense kinetic events. WRITING The fundamental purpose of my writing is to create a web along which I can traverse an experience. When a spider builds a web in a meadow, it immediately becomes part of that meadow's ecosystem. It tethers its home to the other beings in that meadow, and is intimately affected by their experiences, and yet also always remains suspended, transitory, and with a highly peculiar perspective. I am drawn to place-based story, especially stories that are like spiders and webs - a plexus of fierceness, femininity, and power, and possessed of both tensile strength and a gossamer fragility. |
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