My current series of paintings began a few years ago as a direct result of the work from the past 30 years. I spent my third year of art school in Florence, Italy where I started taking pictures of mannequins in store windows and juxtaposing them with photos of raw meat in butcher shop windows. As someone with an eating disorder that began in my teens, I had developed an interest in North American standards of beauty and the objectification of women, and I soon began to examine the conflict between the mind’s will and the body’s appetite through my artwork. I explored our complex and often fraught relationship with food through my sculpture, paintings, collages and photographs focusing mostly on meat. The power and mythology of meat and how it represents men as powerful (for example: as hunters, carvers, grillers) and women as weak (for example: as it is expressed in our language- chick, (fat) cow, (old) crow etc..) is an endless source of fascination for me. Much of my work juxtaposed images of meat and dead animals with materials and processes that are traditionally female (fabric, needlepoint, organic shapes). This contradiction of subject with a method and art form that is traditionally seen as women’s work explored gender stereotypes, objectivity, display and beauty as well as power, virility and control. My final series of paintings using this subject matter are very controlled and deliberate. I started adding drips to some of these paintings for contrast as well as representing a human/animal quality to the paintings. I became intrigued with the drips and the challenges of letting go of control and began to make paintings with just drips.
These drip paintings became about control, covering up and exposing. They are made solely by dripping paint onto canvas. I control the placement of the drip only to give up that control and allow the paint to move on its own, through gravity and chance, choosing its own path. Occasionally I’ll coax the paint to move in a direction that exposes specific colors and covers others. Fragments of color are left trying to hide yet pushing to be seen. Consciously giving up control is challenging. But it forces me to constantly change and problem-solve to create a cohesive painting. The end result is a contradiction of a freedom and a tension as the paintings emerge.