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300
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https://artistparentindex.com/files/original/6a5b3c63539bb6a4426ef547e21903ce.jpg
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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
-
https://artistparentindex.com/files/original/6d7417262bb95944a536c9f0af34d0bf.jpg
e790bfa18f91cde575220c268093852c
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://denisewhitebreadfanning.com/homeland-security.html" target="_blank">http://denisewhitebreadfanning.com/homeland-security.html</a>
Medium
sculpture
performance art
installation
Location
The location of the interview
Michigan
Artist Statement
Created from the perspective of mother, Homeland Security is an ongoing body of work comprised of (often futile or absurd) survival and escape gear made by a mother to protect her family and loved ones from a threatening array of inevitable tragedies or disasters, from simple domestic accidents to acts of terrorism and environmental catastrophes. Fusing the artist's converging interest in survival preparedness and mundane domestic survival, this body of work continues to manifest as a response to the ever present fears of the mother/caregiver, who, influenced by media and the societal commodification of fear, desires to protect that which she most fears losing. Using language culled from Survival Preparedness Handbooks which often doubles as domestic survival mantras, the work explores the line between utmost gravity and the absurd, between our real and daily dangers, and the sense of humor necessary for our survival. All of the work in this series speaks to human fears of loss and mortality, as well as the ego attached to the implied ability to prevent such mortal guarantees.
Topic
motherhood
protection
survival
disasters
accidents
survival planning handbook
survival preparedness
fear
maternal fear
mortality
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
Denise Whitebread Fanning
accidents
installation
lifeboat
maternal fear
Michigan
mortality
motherhood
performance art
sculpture
survival
survival gear
survival handbook
survival preparedness