This project focuses on the “ruin” through women, industry, mythology, and the natural environment which are all depicted as consistent themes throughout my practice. I am especially interested in how the poetic behavioral characteristics in nature are inter-changeable with the traits of humans; the moment of surreal hybridization in which animal/human nature merges, and how this corresponds to structures in nature, and the landscape, to create narratives and environments that question our understanding of these issues.
“The labor of childbirth has been a form of forced labor. For centuries, most women had no means of preventing conception, and they carried the scriptural penalty of Eve’s curse with them into the birth chamber.” ~ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman. New York. W.W. Norton & Company, 1986, p.158)
It is when the patriarch refers to nature as being feminine, that nature is then treated with contempt and disrespect. The Anthropocene shows us, this needs to change, this attitude to nature is the same attitude to women. It is this attitude that is explored through the work here, which not only pushes and questions what is painting today but is examining this dualistic approach to women as nurturers and mothers as opposed to women of power and presence. Mirroring ideas of life and death, presence and absence. I do this by recycling found, painted, and personal objects.
Women / Woman / Her / Mother / Matriarchy
This landscape is Not a Woman
This broken land is fixable but not by human hands, we can try, we can pretend, but the damage is done, only when nature is left to its own devices will naturally heal.
This landscape is not a woman, we are only temporary visitors, here for a short time
nature does not belong to us, we belong to it, nature has its own beating heart flowing through its lands nature has its own language we have just forgotten to listen to a long time ago.
Our time is brief here, this land is not a woman, we should not worry about labels, we are all one kind, we are humankind. But where has the kindness gone, when did we stop being human?
We are both and all feminine, we are both and all masculine, we are the human race, but when did we stop being humane to our race?
Do you feel a lack of power, power is held by the few they make the rules of the land that is not theirs, control is held by the many, be the many, take control.
