About four years ago, I began making artwork using baby food, condensed milk, fabric collage, graphite and paint. The paintings were an exploration of the roles of women in society focusing on sexuality and its outcome, motherhood. The imagery included quantum patterns, cakes, flowers, and objects of fetish and innocence as well as lab rats. As a divorced mother, I had a lot to say, yet found it impossible at the time to resolve the work to my satisfaction. Rather than forcing a trite resolution, I stored it in my attic to return to it at a later date.

This summer I discovered that rats had infested my attic and begun consuming the work. As I was cleaning up the mess and setting traps for the renegade rodents, I was struck by how beautiful the destruction was. Furthermore, the work felt like it had taken the next necessary step, one that I could not have worked through without this element of chance and calamity. It had found completion in actually being consumed. I suddenly knew how to finish the mark making I had begun years before. I understood the work on a level that had previously eluded my conscious mind and now unfortunately, I had to kill my collaborators.

These paintings are an expression of femininity in American culture. By titling the show Consumption, I am intentionally invoking a wide array of meanings and associations to the work ranging from the actual act of eating (or not), consumer culture, psychological/physical ailments of women in the 1800’s as well as now, passion, obsession, nurturing, caretaking, and more.

Visually the work displays a soft beauty but also an element of violence. The holes in the pieces can be seen as torn wounds and also as the space that exists within all women which is the ground for new life. Being a mother is not understood so easily as a hallmark card; birthing is magical and violent by nature. Being a woman is magical and violent by nature. One out of every four women has been raped. Women are also the subject of an inordinate amount of poetry, art, and music. To be a woman is to be seen as a sex object, a nurturer, a victim, sacred, profane, powerful, weak, caged, open, messy, hygienic, in need of protection, a source of safety and morality as mommy, a princess, a whore, a demographic to be penetrated, in need of perfecting, the source of ultimate beauty and kindness. To be a woman is to live all of this, feel all of this. Making complete rational sense of such experience is ultimately impossible as it is constantly changing even though cycles range onward. However change occurs to improve our lives both through chance (if we are open to it) and by examining such things in full honesty.

September 2004