ARTIST | STATEMENT
In my five-decade career as an artist, my work has always addressed issues confronting women. My initial subject of personal introspection and engagement through body language slowly evolved into concerns about women’s reactions and accommodations to their cultural environment, and many years later, expanded again, to the visual meaning of language in general. Communication is elusive, and dependent on historical and cultural contexts. Words and images common to one generation may be unknown to another. This allows my work to examine the changing nature of experience over the course of time and aging, and to comment on themes of expectation and reality, the ideal and the everyday, including the personal and internal debate which continues to occur when women confront themselves and their role in society.
I present this intergenerational mix-up by using images from early- and mid-twentieth century manuals on home management, décor, repair, health, and education, along with contemporary imagery, including home photos and fashion magazines. In addition to using appropriated images from books, I use toile wallpaper patterns as source material. The romanticizing of domestic history is particularly marked in toile wallpaper and thus integral to my work. Open-source artwork from museum collections from the nineteenth century have more recently been integrated into the discourse.
My aim is to encourage information displacement and disorientation. Remixing the narrative creates new associations. Each method changes and deconstructs any hierarchy of information. I hope to do this while still retaining a sense of humor.
Historically, I have worked in two separate mediums: lithography and drawing. Initially, I was primarily concerned with a woman’s internal life, and my imagery had a singular focus and was presented in a realistic space. However, my interests started to change, and I needed a different kind of space in which I could address concurrent realities. About thirty years ago, prompted by this artistic change of direction, my picture plane fell apart. This provided me the visual means to present multiple layers of conflicting experiences. I then began combining lithographic and drawn images to create narrative sequences. This fused the repetitive statement inherent in printmaking with the ability to restate through drawing, thereby changing the context of my work.