August 2023
1991 this is where I was who I was what I could say about all of it
2023 now, revisiting an identity, I am the same but oh so different, less lost less alone more connected
When I look at my earlier work around the studio, it reminds me who I was and make me grateful for who I am and who I still may become. The past work serves as a touchstone and a point of reference for my survival skills, agility and tenacity. I still approach every work as a risk taking experiment, a way to observe and learn- a step towards refinement and authenticity.
This summer there has been a rekindling of my love for sculpture and the physical nature of clay. The additive and subtractive-ness, the scratching building breaking rebuilding tearing- REVEALING.
I went back to a old piece I made in 1991, at the precipice of a great move into my perception of mosaic. When I look at this work, just as when I look at most of my work it is a self portrait, a still life, a snapshot, a still montage of a woman in time.
It was 1991 and I was pregnant with my second son in a difficult and loveless marriage. I had been accepted to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I had applied against the wishes of my then spouse, who wanted me barefoot, pregnant home cooking cleaning caring for his sons. I wanted… I needed to learn more about art and practice and materials and voice. I was still working in my studio with a small child and all the obstacles of money and time and space and the chorus of art naysayers that surrounded me. I was awarded a full scholarship to graduate school, which deferred for two years and continued to work in my studio, making images that I didn’t completely understand at the time.
The work is one of the first explorations into a mosaic practice, and when I say MOSAIC PRACTICE I now mean a mosaic of disciplines as practice. Made in ceramic- the center solitary figure withdrawn and contained, isolated by a protective embryonic-like sac and surrounded by dead colored pink flesh shards of broken ceramic placed in the background. I never showed this piece. I shoved it behind some boards in my studio where is gathered some dust and few spider webs and enjoyed the darkness.
In 2019 I moved out of that studio, after 32 years. I excavated a lot of old work, keeping some for shits and giggles, some for reevaluation, like this one. I had buried this work in my studio, just as I had buried this time in my life when I was alone and disconnected and scared and lost. I had been searching for my birthmother for over 10 years and after the birth of my firstborn Luke, I had stepped up the search. I was floating untethered in the world; I thought my flesh and blood child would anchor me to the earth, but no. I was somebody’s child, I belonged to some tribe somewhere and I came from some mysterious place but no one could answer these questions, no one could help me or understand the need to know. I kept searching.
Thirty two years have passed. I now know the answers to those questions. I revisited that person who was alone without connection. I found my birthmother Gilda only few years after I made that work. Everything shifted- connection to a disturbing and uncomfortable history and a disconnection from the mother that raised me, Midge. Perhaps I am too close to the recent work to fully understand it. I am excited by the life in it, the connection and hope for more of it, the pieces and parts of the past and present that make a person.
Seeing the juxataposition of these artworks I can feel time, similar to seeing an old photo of a child, knowing that many of the parts of a person were there but they are still unresolved, incomplete, not at their full potential, still in transition.