#69 - Senior Seminar Class

Assignment #1 is an artist's statement...here is my rough, rough, rough draft. Might as well qhronicle all this right?! LIke I said, IT'S ROUGH. Give me until the second or third rendition to give input.

ARTISTS STATEMENT

Its taken me a while to identify that which motivates me toward my work. My work floats to the top of stereotypes: Black, white, mixed, woman, daughter, mother, wife. Other. Exoticised. I float to the top of stereotypes. Black and white swirls mixed with mother’s daughter’s wives…Stewart tartan and Kente cloth.

Identities tried on and discarded. Somewhat fearful of getting to the bottom of the heap and there being no one there. Shape-shifter, moving mercurially through moments of juvenile mockery, corporate anonymity, marital monogamy, displaced singularity. Giving birth to borrowed time. An hourglass filled to the brim with grains of laughter and longing and questions seeking a voice. Straining to be heard about the din of the mundane. Phoenixing. Drowning in the mainstream, shards of glass rain down from the ceiling. Straining to hear the voice inside of me as it succumbs to responsibility. I plant apple trees in the Eve’s orchard so women can be wise beyond mere knowledge. Excavation, through silt and sediment, so my children can have fortune, or just a future. This splitting open of myself so that others may learn. But dissecting a frog in death will never tell you of her leap, or her life (or does it?).

Bucking against little prescribed packets, I tend to do things backwards. Seeking the comfort within my own skin, peeling back layers of artifice, shamelessly admiring the beauty in my flaws, placing myself under the microscope, under the knife, under the mouse. These are the voices that scream through my work, or whisper. The voiceless that cry out amidst the entanglement of relationships, and roles. Pressed upon digital leaves are goals and promises. The best of my artistic intentions have always been selfish, struggles to find myself within the lines of a poem, the froth of a dishpan, the eyes of my child, the pixels on a LCD canvas. My nightmares and daydreams live for women who have adversarial relationships with their reflections and retreat into their own shadows. Women who slit their wrists and bleed freedom.

Frontline female, revolution gestating within warm women folds, feeling the universe move within my womb. Content with the confines of the limitless boundary in the mind.