I’ve spent the last decade exploring the world of domestic life and family systems. Although I started as a painter, describing the chaotic and contradictory world of parenting seemed to require a multi-layered, eclectic approach, and I have expanded my practice to include collage, installation and photography. Recently, I’ve been drawn into the digital worlds my children inhabit so readily (in part because the subject of ‘screen’ causes so much debate and anxiety in the cultural discourse) and the imagery I’ve found there has been surprisingly inspiring and oddly familiar. One game had a pixelated, modular landscape—touched with moments of surprising, naturalistic beauty—that became an excellent metaphor for my domestic world. I use this imagery layered with realism, as well as a layering of techniques, to develop the idea of parenting and domestic life as a many-layered experience: funny, moving, and labor-intensive.
I am a mixed media artist, exploring themes of the Maternal, Relationships, Sexual Politics and the Cycle of Life.
I am particularly attracted to Flora's life cycle; I link these to human experience using Anthropomorphism and Pareidolia, these are documented via Photographs & Sculptures, where inspiration from the natural world has become fundamental to my practice.
My sculptures are made from non-traditional materials, based on seeds, their shape & form are often reminiscent of human body parts
Currently my work focuses on pregnancy, motherhood and in particular the dynamics of Mother-Daughter Relationships, Since becoming a Mother myself, I have become obsessed with trying to document 'Moments' & 'Memories', and the 'Essence of my mother', in an attempt to understand the complex relationship that I have with my own mother.
The pieces in this show were completed during my 2011-12 sabbatical leave from my position as Associate Professor at Eastern Oregon University. During this time I traded in my familiar oil paints in exchange for photos, magazines, scissors, and glue to create a group of collages depicting my infant daughter in a variety of surreal settings. The scenes were created using old doll-maker’s magazines, National Geographic magazines, Italian interior design magazines, and brochures for Canadian provincial parks and Tuscan tourism; combined with my own photos of the baby. The result is a strange world combining illogical spaces and multiple perspectives; alternately magical, disturbing, and beautiful. For me, these landscapes reflect the range of hopes and fears surrounding both childhood and child-rearing.
My work is driven by the technical challenge of piecing together intricate parts to create a cohesive whole. The transitions are never actually flawless, as closer inspection reveals sharp edges and layers of overlapping images from disparate sources. I find poetry in this complex relationship between the whole and the parts; where small pieces of imagery come together to form something altogether different and new. As a mother, I wish for all the complicated facets of society to come together harmoniously for my daughter’s safe passage. The Babyscapes collages render that impossible wish visible.
I am fascinated by transformation processes.
I observe transforming spaces, economy, environment, cities, work, cells, bodies, knowledge, history, countries, roles, education, technology, relationships, selves, languages.
Becoming and being a mother is for me all about transformation. My first solo exhibition in the Zepter Gallery in Belgrade, Serbia was called Metamorphosis . The objects I made used banal everyday objects (plastic bags) and transformed them into an immense vagina or into umbilical cords falling from the ceiling. This story from 1999 was a intimate story of separating oneself from the primary family and a story about the everyday and the environment.
From 2006 to 2012 my partner and I went through a series of unsuccessful IVFs and several miscarriages. I did several sculptural works that documented this part of our lives - like the Womb exhibited in 2010 in Museum de Ceramica de l’Alcora, Spain. It was just about the pain, I guess.
In 2012, I was invited to make an urban intervention inside the Vesel Garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was three months pregnant with my son and did not know what to expect about the occurring pregnancy. So I did an urban intervention with a participative performance and called this work Embryo garden. It was all about the thin line between life and death of the child to be, but also of the artistic child within myself.
My experience as a parent has been both challenging and inspiring for me as an artist. I explored the relationship between the roles of artist and parent in my 2016 exhibition in the Glass Atrium of the City Hall of Ljubljana, called A Thank You Note To the Cleaning Lady. The work that lent its name to the exhibition questions the relation between reproductive, maintenance work and having greater purpose in life. As a whole, the exhibition was born as a product of broken antagonism between being a parent and an artist and of cooperation between the two roles. The installation To Include Everything, Everything, Everything, Absolutely, Absolutely, Everything especially focused on that. And the work The Map is about the child experiencing and learning by himself, and the artist-mother just observing and taking notes. In this process, I sometimes feel as if steeling from him.