My Story:
I am a visual Artist and Art teacher originally from Wichita, Ks. I work mostly in mixed media. I live and work in Viola (Southwest of Wichita) with my husband Brandon who is also an Artist. We often work together and share ideas.
Artist Statement on recent work:
Nostalgia, ephemera as well identity have a strong presence in my work. I create narratives with texts, an assortment of domestic objects and vintage imagery that have been given a new life as a work of art. Lately I have rediscovered my love for craft and activities that are known as domestic and feminine in nature such as sewing as well as using recycled materials which touches on previous ideas of impermanence and temporality that I have often explored before in my work. I alter objects to transform them and give them a new life as a work of art. I embellish my work with the pieces of material that usually get left unnoticed.
I am engaged by the stories of others and use my own narratives as a place to build imagery. I often reflect on the construct of the family in my work as well as locational identity. Being in between two places has placed an emphasis on my need to become more aware of my location as a part of my identity. The state of in between had led me towards ideas of nostalgia and ephemera which I explore through a feminist perspective. I see my altered books and text pieces in a state between reality and fiction. The books offer recourse to the iconography of fairy tales and fables that become a narrative for the self. Domestic themes, storytelling and western iconography inform my art and are a constant source of inspiration.
Research and specifics on certain pieces:
The focus of my work has been about themes dealing with life’s transitions specifically from connections established at birth as well as the point of departure from the mother. My intention is to narrate the complex mother and child relationship through symbolic objects that represent the idea of the mother as the center. This space is located within the child’s responses and needs for the mother, it’s abject dependency on her, the fury or threat it feels at any withdrawal of the attention it seeks, the desire to return to a conflict free state of being, and even the desire to destroy her.
The nature of my projects have included recent research on The Uncanny from the work of Freud and others philosophers and artists whose work touches upon childhood memory and states of uncertainty. The Uncanny being something very close to us that has undergone a mysterious change. This state of mind is described in the personal uncanny as an awareness of our own coming into being from ourselves by the aid of autobiography. The perceptual uncanny situates itself in the knowledge that the self is other before it is a self. The sexual uncanny is the complex relationship and feelings towards the mother which I explore in my visual works, more specifically the mother as all-powerful and threatening. I have discovered through my work and process an identification with the uncanny as something that is familiar in the mind alienated through repression which, comes to light that should have remained hidden. It is a process of transformation in materials belonging to an emotional impulse, which reoccurs in my working method and within the objects themselves.
The cords are made into objects that contain irony they are nurturing but made into objects that are about capturing, taming and controlling. Other cords are made into objects of escape and survival. This can be interpreted as the departure from the mother. The umbilical ladder suggests fairytales, games and evokes a flight of the imagination, which suggests a different reality. The ladder and noose represent a narrative of life and death, a passage to the unknown. It is escape as well as an entrance into the world; one that we have all endured of trauma and then repressed. The ladder suggests meat in texture and color. It looks as though it is in various processes of decay. Dark humor can also be seen in the way I am handling the materials as a means to escape towards a surreal space. All of these pieces are seen as physically interactive and display a ropes function. They contain literal reference with a play on words in phrases such as “cutting the cord” “life line” or within the physical process “the ties that bind”.
The sensuous materials are meant to create an emotional charge as well as a comment on the bodies fragility and dispersal. Taboo objects as Mary Douglas describes in Purity and Danger possess alarming traits that are both sacred and unclean at the same time. Julia Kristeva describes the ‘abject’ as that which is both a part of us and not part of us, such as bodily fluids, blood and secretions. The existence of these entities remind us that we do not exist as autonomous beings but are only passageways for the ingress and egress of other parts of the world. The umbilical cord itself is seen in this context. The intestinal reference represents our dependence upon the abject to survive. This is how the objects take shape as tools for survival or as a mechanism of escape.
I want my sculptures to create the desire to be touched and at the same time create a sense of visual and physical tension. If one can look and tell how they would feel they will be effective in evoking that which is familiar to ones sense of touch. I want to create visceral identification within the works dealing within the framework of the body. All do not have to be exact replications but references that have the look of being entrails or umbilical cords. It is a description of the inside meant to evoke an emotional response. The cords are not meant to be disgusting rather they are meant to display the idea of beauty in ugliness.
Most of these pieces are installation based, which depends on an intimate environment to be displayed emphasizing connections to the interior spaces of the human body. Aesthetics, emotive response and utility result from the space and form that the cords take shape within recalling a physical drawing line made from the cords when placed in open space. These works demand a specific physical space as a group and as separate pieces. The work has centered around maternal connections and this includes how women define themselves as continuous with others, The feminine sense of self being connected to the world and how that creates a specific space for identity.
In many of my recent works I am rebelling against this idea in search for autonomy or to create narratives for the self. This rebellion comes from my own relationship with my mother. The cords are still placed in the context of connections despite their being about separation. They are displaced as objects of threat; they desire the opposite of their being. They are descriptions of longing to be but cannot given its origins.
Feminist psychoanalysis’s, Chodorow and Flax define this space stating that the mother remains an important inner object throughout adult life-mothers identify more strongly with female infants, seeing them more as extensions of themselves, whereas they encourage boys to become separate and autonomous. Ego boundaries between mothers and daughters are more fluid, more undefined. Chodorow suggests females value connection and continuity whereas males value separation.
A feminine personality it is said comes to be based less on repression of inner objects, and fixed and firm splits on the ego and more on retention and continuity of external relationships. From the retention of pre-oedipal attachments to their mother, growing girls come to define themselves as continuous with others; their experience of self contains more flexible and permeable ego boundaries. Boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation’s. The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world; the basic masculine sense of self is separate. (Marianne Hirsch, Review: Mothers and Daughters, pg.206) This independence is not only from a “mother” but from a patriarchal system of language and values defined by male culture under male terms.
My pieces represent fragility and strength of maternal connections. My research is developing a way to reconnect with the past and analyze through biographical and biological inner connectivity. Lynn Sukenick has called matrophobia the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers bondage, to become individuated and free. It traces a relationship minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy. It explores silences surrounding this relationship. A loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter. (Marianne Hirsh, Review: Mothers and Daughters)
The work itself is involved in a ritualistic process that lends itself to other cultural beliefs and taboos, both positive and negative in the act of binding and tying knots. Tying and binding a rope is also related to recollection and memory. The binding of the ropes also represents the connection between mother and child. Aesthetics, emotive response and utility result from the space and form that the cords take shape within recalling a physical drawing line made from the cords when placed in open space. These works demand a specific physical space as a group and as separate pieces.
