ARTIST STATEMENT

My work embodies the feminist art maxim, “The personal is political.” I use my life experience, historical research, and material exploration to make projects and series that contradict oppressive systems and connect to family and place. Working across a range of scales, I incorporate performance, installation, book arts, and smaller two-dimensional work to explore themes of sexism, disability, and racism. This direction began while attending the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. While there I discovered performance, which I used to viscerally understand my identity as a female and my experience with stuttering and disability oppression. In preparation for my solo performance Mouthpiece, performed at The Lhasa Club in Hollywood, I asked myself “what would you say if you could say anything?” I then shared the answer through the character of a stuttering lounge singer/stand-up comedian.

After the birth of my son in 1988, I wrote and published Strong Hearts, Inspired Minds: 21 Artists Who Are Mothers Tell Their Stories. I highlighted how the roles of mother and artist shared oppressive features. In my series of encaustic watercolor paintings, Mounds and Stones, I reached back millennia to connect with my ancestral homeland in Scotland and England. I used images of Neolithic monuments that reflect this ancient culture’s relationship to place and knowledge of topography and astronomy. I continued this thread in the touring installation I Am My White Ancestors: Claiming the Legacy of Oppression, my answer to the question “what would it look like to claim your people?” In the project I embodied my ancestors through thirteen life-size photographic portraits printed on fabric, accompanied by audio narratives that reveal the generational impulse to oppress. 

My recent work probes into cultural causes of climate change such as human disconnection from the environment by nurturing my own relationships to plants. This work includes The Plant Messengers, a series of earth-friendly botanical contact prints on reused fabric, and The Plant Beings, an outdoor ephemeral installation. These recurring themes of oppression, family, and place are united by my urge to understand and solidify connection, whether between collaborators, with my heritage, or the plants that keep me alive on this planet.