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Tuesday, November 29, 2005



Monday, November 28, 2005

Drawing and Automaticality

The following works are my latest attempt at letting loose and allowing myself to explore what drawing has to offer my free hand. I am using the time spent in the studio to practice a type of automatic writing. I want the words and lines to spill out of me unedited in order to get to the unconscious things that I have been working on. There is tension and beauty in each of the drawings. The work has offered me my own inkblot tests with which to create and experience my own stories. This practice of allowing the work to come rather than forcing it has crept into most everything else I have done. I find it extremely challenging not to drive the outcome. This has pushed me beyond what I believed with my conscious mind to be possible.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I grew up in the South, a fact I tried to run from, hide from others and deny. I was embarrassed by the limited way I felt some of “my people” looked at the rest of the world. I felt that I too would be associated with the bigotry, “family values” and prejudice that were around me. I have since learned that I have a responsibility to answer to the things that I was taught. I also feel it necessary, like a calling—to quote my Baptist preaching grandfather—to respond the questions that the world around me refused to answer: questions about ethnicity, gender, sexuality and god.

Drawing, printmaking and painting allow my hand the freedom that my words were not allowed to have. As a woman, I was taught to be demure, graceful and charming…all things I fought vehemently, much to my mother’s dismay. Words were never what they meant on the surface, but had many hidden meanings. (“Oh, Bless her heart” sounds really kind but is actually derogatory, meaning that someone usually doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain.) My work reflects the concept of layering meanings both literally and figuratively.

My work is a response to and a celebration of situation and location and how these things can affect the way one views the world. I use the figure as a metaphor for humankind and the sadness and beauty of living.