STATEMENT OF WORK

I have long been fascinated with archetypes of women, girls, and feminine gender throughout the ages. This has led me to collect Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendars and Playboy magazines, to study ancient Grecian caryatids, Cycladic figurines and many-breasted portrayals of fertility goddesses, to the madonnas of the High Renaissance, to odalisques in European painting, to dolls and their dollhouses, and on and on. Women have been depicted and entrapped by imagery since the beginning of time, occasionally by themselves and mostly by men, and I am ever beguiled by how these images both reflect and dictate the feminine experience. 

Recently, this query has led me to the symbol of a woman as a pictogram, made up of a circle (representing her head) and a triangle (representing her dress). You might find her on a sign outside the bathroom. I am interested in the universal and immediate legibility of these two shapes as they create a glyph, and I have been using this as a prompt for geometric and color field abstraction.

Furthermore, I have been playing with the motif of paper chain dolls. Conceptually, I like thinking of these as hand-made ideas of femininity at its most rudimentary (often created by girls of girls), but I am also interested in them formally, as it transforms the one into many, the monolith into a pattern. 

Thinking about community, connectivity, and bodies in space, I toy with the lines between painting and drawing, between abstraction and figuration, between flatness and depth. Exploring gender and how it is performed, embodied, and mythologized, I question the ideal form. What if a triangle plus a circle equals a woman? Is she trapped by these lines? Or may I offer her liberation in a new context?