STATEMENT OF WORK

Making art is a way of living, of knowing myself and the world, from inside its integrative process. I use the body as a concept, an inner and public subject, and a vision, to critique our present culture and picture a better world. Presenting the figure in various historical formats (full figure, bust, heads; drawing, sculpture) is an act of freedom in the face of life's suffering and political oppression. Its symbolic significance echoes many indigenous cultures going back to the earliest times of art, and affirms their relevance to a life/nature balance so relevant to the current era, cultures who lived in a matrix of interconnection, mutuality, sacred cycles, hospitality, and the gift. It is in contrast to our hidden cultural ideology that we must win a war against nature. By a new Story of the People and conceiving of the heart as an organ of perception, my conceptual markers are a vision body for such ancient values and the dissenting body against current injustice, war and exploitation.

The following primary experiences have shaped my viewpoint: living as a female Other under patriarchy; coming of age in the tumultuous politics of the 1960 while the US was simultaneously at its apex of economic abundance and hopes; ongoing reading and self-educating across a wide range of interests; practicing yoga and meditation with the followers and teachings of Muktananda; living for a year each in Paris, France and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; working as an artist outside the gallery system with a day job and without institutional support for fifty years; and eighteen months living in a homeless shelter 2019-21 during Covid, in addition to raising a daughter. I am now 81 years old.

My first serious art making was at NYU studying with such artists as Milton Resnick and Robert Kaupelis who directed my attention to abstract expressionist painting and experimental and observational approaches toward drawing the figure. My education confirmed that we can live utilizing both a body and a mind, that we can value the analytic/rational as well as the holistic, inclusive, intuitive, emotional, and poetic.

Two examples of some recent sculptures are a group called Fringe Elements, consisting of highly individuated masks mounted on a standard, representing the Other---the dumped and discarded, outsiders, and scapegoats who serves as social objects of aggression or exclusion. The sculptures' aesthetics invite the viewer to draw near and cohabit their space with empathy, to see the monsters as ourselves, and even enter a place of transfiguration. Another work Corporate State made from cardboard, paper, plaster, bitumen, and using the politically commemorative bust-form, hangs on the wall. It represents the corporate legal person, a current dominating political power, as a shadowy, bulging and belching volume projecting into space colored by its signature material, petroleum.