Borderline (group exhibition)

Artworks Loveland

 

Loveland, Colorado 

 

November-December 2017

 

Rowan Series

 

While pregnant with my second child, a girl, I was having strong feelings of female empowerment.  Around that same time, I had a meeting about my career and was given advice that seemed appropriate for my male counterparts, but not necessarily applicable to me and didn’t seem to cater to my typical female buyers.  I felt defiant.  I started to feel that my organic forms, my organisms, needed to push through boundaries.  I imagined them forcing their way into space, growing and expanding in the face of these perceived constraints, prevailing in their growth.  I began to envision this new body of work as an augmentation driven by girl power.  I wanted to use hot pink and the pieces to be large in scale to force your experience in the movement.  I’ve named the series after my daughter, Rowan.

 

As a continuation of this series, I further explored the feminine experience in the art world.  I created a large wall mural and installation that drove home the idea of expansion and growth.  I was interested in breaking the frame of the canvas and expanding into the surrounding space. I originally wanted to create a form that was crushing the words of sexists, I wanted it to feel aggressive and dominant. But then, of course, what am I doing? I am replaying their words, I’m continuing to spread the negativity but not the truth- and the voices are male! Fuck the male voice, let us hear from the women, let’s hear their accounts of the bias in the art world and hear their words within my work.

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I gathered accounts from women in the art and design world.  The words, the accounts, the comments were drawn or painted on small book covers of various sizes. Little by little, the pieces climbed from the floor line towards the middle of the wall, meeting and overlapping on the large panel.  A large form reminiscent of those found in my Rowan series is painted on the panel, but also breaking off the edges, off the plane of the canvas. The form reaches to some of the wall edges, using the entire wall as the composition.