Working between painting, sculpture and textiles, my practice deals with two interwoven and synonymous subjects, the woman and the animal. Usually made on constructed or collaged surfaces, my paintings and hangings depict somewhere between ‘humanness’ and ‘animalness’. Sometimes these images occur as scenes; hairy headed characters caught in various actions and glances; or sometimes they appear as arrangements or hybrids of symbols and objects. I use cloth, clay and paper to create objects, embellished with or imitating, tools and implements, bodies and objects, which live alongside the images and their inhabitants.
I have been attempting to deal simultaneously with states of being and states of meaning; thinking through the cultural situations and lived experiences of the female, the human and the animal. Drawing from personal experiences, memories and interrelated archetype and myth, I was looking to create an overlap of symbol and experience, poking at the spaces between in an effort to articulate a form of complicated femininity through the hairy women and the worlds they inhabit.
I am not quite ready to put the hairy women to bed or to abandon their use as players and figures through whom I can explore in between places. Instead, I want to take a sideways step and a close up of them as characters, where they came from, what they do when they’re alone.
