These women, these bodies, survive- engaged in acts of both stillness and inner movement surrounded by botanicals that equally support and nourish. The body is fractured, reflected yet solid.
Press Release
Lesson in Survival
Buried memories do strange things to confidence and creativity. The energy spent in survival mode darkens the palette, clouds vision. To counterbalance the weight of a season of heavy news and challenging life events, I began a personal project that evolved to be a study of light and the body. This work represents a challenge to the darkness of past experiences, buried thoughts.
These women, these bodies, survive- engaged in acts of both stillness and inner movement surrounded by botanicals that equally support and nourish. The body is fractured, reflected yet solid.
The sensual female body – in nature, in or near water. Water – essential source – transforms, heals.
When you find yourself far out at sea, away from shore,
In floating you stop expending the energy of struggle.
You are just there- accepting the weight and roots of all that is.
This work represents two converging bodies of work that are inspired by the female voice of two artists: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Joni Mitchell – artists who through words address the struggle of even making the work, being heard, the cost of liberating your time and energy to the creative impulse in the patriarchal system.
Her Name is Vincent -Guided by the feminist poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay- many of the images were created in and around her inspired landscape of mid coast Maine. Responding to prompts from Millay’s poems to the visceral landscape where harsh seasons bear sweet fruit- I traded the textual language of poems with the visual language of light. The making of Lumen prints- juicy objects put to paper, the work of the hand, the sun creating it all – was a healing process in a time of rough waters.
Lesson in Survival -Joni Mitchell’s words brought hope in a time of despair. Her confessional challenge to a woman’s place in the creative world, the truth of incompatibility, the cost of it all on the psyche gave me a map of strength through the creative process.