My work questions the assumptions underpinning the lives of women and
girls and is characterized by nostalgia, personal mythology, humour, and
resentment.
Through acrylic portraits referencing family snapshots, mixed media collages
combining vintage magazine images with expressive mark making, and digital
compositions that remix these forms and processes, my work depicts
grandmothers, mothers, and daughters forging identities and world views out of a chaotic barrage of information and
expectations. My work situates us as real, individual women among versions
or prototypes of womanhood proposed within the broader context of
cultural and metaphorical symbols, including advertising text fragments and
circles and other surprises.
Painting and remixing family photos and advertising art from decades significant to the
women in my matriarchal lines allows me to temporarily overcome the linear
nature of time. I can access an instant that, without the photograph would
have been swiftly forgotten, or survived, at best, as an ever dimming
impression. I can stretch time, spending hours and days inside a
millisecond, carefully observing, reconsidering, recombining, reforming and
re-contextualizing details according to my feelings and to what makes some
sense to me. I can take (guilty) pleasure in the surfaces I render, luxuriating
in patterns, textiles, fonts and textures.
Each snapshot and ad image I work with depicts a performance – often of
happiness, competence, or satisfaction, (although sometimes discontent or
distress), in the context of one’s own culture and time. As I work, I have very
mixed feelings; I am fiercely proud of these women when they appear to be
nailing perfect performances of the version of femininity dictated by their
time, and I am distressed by the knowledge that these ideals are
unsustainable, designed to keep women locked in an oppressive cycle of
striving, and distractions from the true task of living a meaningful life on
one’s own terms.