1
300
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https://artistparentindex.com/files/original/6a5b3c63539bb6a4426ef547e21903ce.jpg
2fe7a6ab781d8b9f9c3a5254552f4d02
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Artist Parent Index
Person
An individual.
Website
The Artist's website
<p class="p1"><a href="jesstaylorartist.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">jesstaylorartist.com</a></p>
Medium
sculpture
new media
Location
The location of the interview
Adelaide
Australia
Artist Statement
<p class="p1">I am an early career artist whose practice explores my fascination with fictional horror through primarily digital methods of making. Within the broader realm of horror, I have a particular interest in monsters, voyeurism, and depictions of female brutality, sadism, and masochism. Using my own image and body exclusively, my work presents versions of womanhood that transgress the bounds of what we are taught is acceptable, uncanny spectres of female experience that society is keen to repress. Here, monstrosity is configured as a source of damnation and agency, reflecting womanhood as complex and contradictory.</p>
<p class="p2"></p>
<p class="p3">My own experience as a mother has been one of profound contradiction, of exhilarating highs and profound lows, of love and fury, comfort and trauma. I struggle to reconcile the fact that the greatest time in my life is also the one when it was the darkest, and that my body birthed a miracle but feels like a ruin. I am not as I was, but not quite sure what I am now; I’ve yet to turn into anything resembling the gargantuan mother archetype we’re fed, and too much of the old Jess remains for me to consider myself someone new. I have been transformed, reborn, reconfigured using the old parts. Some days those new parts feel like they were made of steel, making me infinitely stronger than I was, and other days that steel bites into my flesh, broken limbs fused back together suddenly failing to bear my weight.</p>
<p class="p4"></p>
<p class="p3">Motherhood is a monstrous condition; it is incredible and disturbing, beautiful and completely fucked up. Like monstrosity, it is transformative, and for the woman-monster, this transformation is a source of both agency and damnation, strength and weakness. My work since my son is in part an attempt to reconcile the contradiction inherent in my own experience of motherhood, and to bridge the divide between what I am and what we are told a mother should be.</p>
<p class="p3">Experiencing pregnancy for the second time has greatly influenced my work, causing me to reflect much more closely on the process of bearing a child. There is the strange bodily awareness and attempts to reconcile this cavernous space that exists within me, and evocations of my own paranoias as I imagine this space as a place of both hope and doom. I like to think there is also some absurdity when one looks at a ridiculous, bulbous woman, or my lady-giants, but there is also the tenderness of the nets that keep the babies close to her body, or the way a stomach is opened up to sate the curiosity of the smaller figures who peer inside. There is the sorrow of the figure on the bridge as she surveys the fallen before her (a mediation on periods in history where the practice of fallen-mothers ending their lives and the lives of their offspring was not only a grim expectation, but an act of redemption), and my attempt to see a ruin as a place of beauty and life.</p>
Topic
abjection
ambivalence
anger
anxiety
artist mother
attachment
autonomy
bad mother
birth
birth trauma
body transformation
boundaries
childbirth
contemporary
contemporary art practice
contradictions
domestic
family ties
female experience
female sexuality
feminine
femininity
feminism
feminist
feminist art
feminist art theory
fertility
grotesque
growth
guilt
identity
loneliness
longing
loss
loss of identity
maternal ambivalence
maternal anxiety
maternal body
maternal desire
maternal experience
maternal fear
maternal guilt
mother
mother artist
motherhood
postpartum body
pregnancy
pregnant body
psychoanalysis
representation
science fiction
self portrait
technology
trauma
voyeurism
womb
women
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Jess Taylor
abjection
ambivalence
anger
anxiety
artist mother
attachment
Australia
autonomy
bad mother
birth
birth trauma
body transformation
boundaries
childbirth
contemporary art
contemporary art practice
contradictions
domestic
family ties
female experience
female sexuality
feminine
femininity
feminism
feminist
feminist art
feminist art theory
feminist theory
fertility
grotesque
growth
guilt
identity
loneliness
longing
loss
loss of identity
maternal
maternal ambivalence
maternal anxiety
maternal bodies
maternal body
maternal desire
maternal experience
maternal fear
maternal guilt
mother
mother artist
motherhood
new media
postpartum body
pregnancy
pregnant body
psychoanalysis
representation
science fiction
sculpture
self portrait
technology
trauma
voyeurism
womb
women
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https://artistparentindex.com/files/original/6336856bbeb9657ba08b4d4b53e6a538.jpg
18e936bc0c096c17a7064b3adbf020b1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Decades of Dreaming of You 2012, hair embroidery on mother's (artist's) hair from gestation period, thread from unraveled pillowcase, 3 x 5 x 5". Text reads "Decades of Dreaming of You"
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Artist Parent Index
Person
An individual.
Website
The Artist's website
<a href="http://www.katekretz.com/work-by-series/#/new-gallery-2/" target="_blank">http://www.katekretz.com/work-by-series/#/new-gallery-2/</a>
Medium
sculpture
embroidery
hair
fiber
textile
Artist Statement
“I often experience news stories of inhumanity as a literal blow to my body, and carry the negative energy around with me until I process a way to remove it from my person through transformative creation. My work functions as a meditation, a healing prayer, a potent incantation to embed the finished object with as much power as possible, to rival the impact of that original negative impetus for making it. I am aiming for a beautiful, exquisitely-crafted gut punch.
I consider the inordinate amount of time invested in each piece as a gift given to the viewer. In this day and age, it often feels as though the earnest, cathectic things I make are an act of profound resistance: I give birth to the tactile as I am swallowed by the virtual. I obsess over craft as our world becomes disposable. I wield emotion in its messiness because it’s uncool. I work until my hands shake, because the world does not care.
I am banging my head against the wall, but the stain is beautiful.”
Topic
motherhood
gestation
motherhood and creative practice
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Kate Kretz
embroidery
fiber
gestation
hair
longing
motherhood
motherhood and art practice
sculpture
textile