Overall Statement about My WorkDownloadable copy of my Heartspace artist statement and biography:
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I am a multidisciplinary artist exploring personal experience as a gateway to broader human concerns and experience. I got my start in drawing and painting, especially of the human figure and portrait. That work always had a very human focus, as well as artistic, but not toward a human-centric philosophy, rather to access our deeper humanity which ultimately connects everyone to everything, the opposite of our current isolationist narrative dominating social and political discourse and policy.
Being multidisciplinary suits the range and insatiable curiosity of my mind as well as my interest, as a longtime designer, in meaningful application of form and material to idea or expression. In my studio I am always testing, experimenting and prototyping, new materials, processes and combinations. Hybrid forms and media are a special interest, perhaps because I am a hybrid person, being biracial and bi- (or even tri-) cultural. I work in installation art as well as making images and objects. My media continues to include painting and drawing (sometimes as performance), with the addition of photo-based and mixed media sculpture, working with found objects, printmaking, photo-based (esp with mixed media), photo-digital printmaking or video, upholstery, textile and fibre. Subject to Limitation is the umbrella for my interrelated work related to confinement and barriers of all kinds, which then also led me into examining vulnerability, empathy, identity and migration. In that work you'll see boxes and fences of various kinds as well as domestic objects like drawers and chairs that later branched out into two further streams: houses-lawns-domestic life in one and skin (as social barrier, as physical barrier, signifying human vulnerability and as a vehicle for empathy) in the other. In A Full Heart, and most recently Heartspace, I use the anatomical structures of the heart as a gateway to exploring states of the human heart viscerally, emotionally, poetically and metaphorically. It grew out of my interest in medical models and antique anatomical illustrations, an laterally connected to and combined with my work on skin, vulnerability and empathy. While hearts are my main focus right now, the other elements find their way into that work which enriches and deepens it. I look forward to seeing what happens in 2020 after a very intense 18 months of completing three-and-a-half major related installations and shows, each of which was an opportunity to foster and manifest new ideas and discoveries. | ||