Artist Statement

 

An active artist since 1990, my oeuvre ranges between painting, drawing, installation, writing and book making. Concerned with issues of identity, gender and trauma, I work with and through a feminist critique: exploring silenced social narratives expunged from the main account of history.

​

Many of my work processes are ongoing, cumulative. I draw and write daily in notebooks and sketchbooks: thoughts, observations, and images, including events mitigated by screens and social media. I use the line as a way to highlight the unspeakable subtext of my chosen imagery. Together, these form a personal database to which I return to, work and re-work across methods and mediums. 

​

Painting was my first chosen medium, training traditionally, I work in oil on canvas. In my paintings I address the female body, or segments of it, in both abstract and figurative imagery infusing the works with my own embodied experience. 

​

Over the last decade, the making of artist books has become a central part of my practice, which I treat as art-objects in and onto themselves. As a writer, I explore the limits of traditional genres of storytelling: expanding, bending and stretching the possibilities of narrative. I form my books by joining together pre-existing text and imagery, through a process of “disconnected editing”. There is no attempt to illustrate one with the other, instead, it is the Caesura (Bion) existing in the midst of their convergence which brings forward a new kind of engagement. 

​

Working with all my existing mediums, bringing together pieces from different times and places, I act as the author, curator and editor of my own narrative, researching the possibilities of constructing a new syntax. In this, I found editing to be a key tactic, which I employ for the creation of both my exhibitions and artist books.