STATEMENT OF WORK

As a multi-disciplinary artist with interest in the lineage of women artists and the interchange of photography and craft, I currently focus on making work with analog photography, painting and weaving, embodying notions of light and tactility as healing objects. 

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My current art works are large-scale (6-9 feet) photo construction reliefs involving photos and weaves, and smaller collages. I am interested in complicating the sameness and flatness of photo consumption in our image-saturated era, and in creating an eco-feminist, tactile and sustainable presence utilizing natural fibers in my work. 

My Femina Luminous constructions combine large handmade weaves on looms, created intuitively as a labor-intensive ritual, with analog large-format photos of glowing plasma-like material (eggs). The photos connect a sense of nature and the cosmos with ‘work from the kitchen table’ - as women throughout history and all cultures have done with their craft. They are large-format color c-prints, created with an analog 4x5 camera in the studio, mounted on aluminum. The weaves are made by hand in a laborious and time-consuming continuous weave process. I create them on custom built, shaped (triangular or semi-circular for example) looms made from wood and nails, around which I weave the threads. The weaves are made from natural fibers such as kid silk, linen, cotton, alpaca wool and silk mohair. I present the weaves on the loom on which they were made, as an indication of their creation process, and use the loom as a frame on which they are stretched without being preciously ‘framed.' 

The smaller Cosmology Collages create and tangle relationships between notions of art and craft, nature, and our bodies, through smaller weaves, photos, and paintings of historical black and white dance photographs. Specifically, my oil and watercolor paintings are based on Barbara Morgan's photos of Martha Graham and her dancers; while the black and white photos in the collages are analog 4x5 contact prints of curvy, body-like dunes that I shot in one of the most arid areas of earth, the Namib desert in Namibia. They are intended as small packs of knowledge regarding the body and the environment. 

In Sanskrit 'tantra' means ‘loom’, ‘weave’ and ‘treatise.’ Many wise goddesses in Greek mythology are connected to weaving. Textile = text. My work creates and reflects a kind of universal cosmology that is meant to heal and bring forth an ecological and female empowerment. 

I spent the two years of the pandemic living on the water, observing the light and the movement of the tides closely. The power of light became an even more essential presence in my consciousness and inspiration for my work.
Thus, the core principle guiding my work is connecting tactile matter (natural fibers) to light, and the body as a wholistic tantric site through which humans experience physical and spiritual reality, our relationship to nature, and the ethereal and scientific aspects of the universe.