It's been a long while since my website has contained anything like a cohesive (or even coherent) artist statement. In fact, I've been making funnies over at Twitter (mostly because I have no idea what to do on Twitter) and even plotted out a zine of funny fake artists statements that may still happen. Or maybe an artist statement in poem fragments. The notes for and ideas thereof have been scattered across various interviews and blog entries and elsewhere, but since the early days of my website, I hadn't put everything together. Since I was waxing yesterday about some similar subject matter, and making notes for a podcast interview I gave earlier today, I thought I'd give it a go. Sometimes I feel like one is not enough, so maybe the goal is a string of statements that form a whole, but this is the first...
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Artist Statement
A writer and book artist, I am interested in the ways visual elements and text work together to tell a story--sometimes linear, sometimes circular or fragmented. My education and early career was devoted to words and language. I came to visual arts later--primarily book and paper related forms--collage, assemblage, printmaking, book sculpture. Over the past decade, I've worked to fold both visual and written elements into my process in new ways.
My work typically manifests in a printed medium--artist books, zine projects, chapbooks-- as well as occasional exhibits and installations. Over the years, these projects have constellated into longer manuscripts of poetry/prose hybrid work. My aesthetic approach explores certain cultural veins--gothicism, horror, surrealism. My themes closely align with my slant as a feminist --knowledge and danger, domestic spaces (safe and unsafe), suburban unrest, women as muse vs. creators, language and the body, mothers & daughters, nature vs. civilization. My subject matter reflects ongoing passions and obsessions --victoriana, sideshows & carnivals, zodiac signs, horror movies, taxidermy, monstrous women, science fiction, mythology, fairy tales, ghost stories, urban legends. I love that which juxtaposes the beautiful and the terrible, the pretty and the horrific. I am also interested in the midwest as both place and concept, and much of my work finds its roots there.
Stylistically, I am interested in fragmentation, polyvocality, and distortion of narrative. I tend to work in the grey area between poetry and prose. The tension between the visual and the written and their combined effect. I love appropriated and misused forms--epistolaries, footnotes, indices. In current projects , I am fascinated by the possibilities of the lyric essay as medium for memoir. I am very much about utilizing ephemera, found elements, and collage in both my written and visual work., which manifests both in my mediums and my approach to composition.
