Surrogate
All of the conscientiously flawed characters I create are born from my own history of embodiment. Obstetric and gynecological surgeries have been an early and enduring presence in my life. Some hide their intent behind acronyms: LEEP, D&C; while others are more direct: mastectomy, reconstruction, revision, graft. These procedures have saved my life, left a history of scars and colored the way I think about beauty. It created the collaged aesthetic that runs through my work; and has left me with a sensibility that will always lean towards the grotesque.
Animals show up as surrogates throughout our visual and narrative history. The hybrids that fill my own work use this tie to animal nature as gateway to freedom. Every-body is wrong. Every-body is constructed of multitudes. Every-body is navigating a world with what they have been given. Every-body has a history. I use these surreal bodies to talk about shared human experience in a way that is ripe and ambiguous. Birth, love, motherhood and loss are enacted by hypnagogic counterparts.
My work caresses and manipulates the intimate, vulnerable and flawed taboos surrounding singular definitions of normality. Cut and stitched together from books, magazines, and the internet, the hybrids that fill my work do not belong in our world. They are the “others”, the outsiders that don’t fit within the clear boundaries of society. They are an investigation and acceptance of difference.
