wow!

So already today things have come unstuck in the studio, staring at the wallpaper I suddenly found it inhabited by many many moth like creatures all crawling about willy-nilly in there, the light isn’t good right now but I will try to get a picture later… and i rewrote that damn statement again, I thing its obviously less wordy and maybe better?? I think jean was right that the other version belongs on my website somehow… so be brutal, here it is

For many years I have been fascinated with the discourses surrounding madness and the stories of women historically trapped inside the boundaries of those ideas. Recently I have been further engaged by a resonance I perceived between this discussion and the language of Victorian design reform. All of this interest has been focused through the space of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper”, a work that concerns both mad women and immoral design. As I have lived with these dialogues, I have again filtered them through the lens of my experience, and I find now that this work has begun to distil out of this intersection and spill into the studio. I feel the presence of these women, the hysterics, the domestic and material feminists, the utopian dreamers, they remain as the paper cocoons of their words across time, and revealed they flutter, insubstantial, like moths beating vainly against a darkened window pane.  I find there is no way to be outside of the pattern, that to find a space I must struggle to inhabit the interstices between ornament and flourish. This new work is about finding what lies in this between, of living in the pattern and subverting its lines to make my own design. I find myself drawn back repeatedly to work that requires repetition and the labor of my hands and always to the presence of text and pattern and to making work that inhabits the spaces of the studio and gallery.