In arranging my work on this website I have followed a photographic convention of grouping work in subjects or projects, however, it is not my belief that the work needs to be viewed in single categories. This is just one way of viewing the work.
I welcome any comments or inquire.
The impetus for this work stretches back to my childhood when my father made chicken soup every other Monday. I loved the soup and never tired of it but I remember at a certain point be began putting several pairs of bright yellow chicken feet into the pot along with the chicken. The sight of multiple pairs of feet was jarring and it left a lasting impression. Soup from that point on was no longer the simple comfort food it had been.
This Christmas while I was washing a turkey to cook for dinner, I noticed that the bird had bruises on both of its elbows. It is difficult to see food as both fellow animal and meal and this view does carry into my work.
Like many others today, I see food as a complicated comfort. This aspect of being attracted and repelled carries through in much of my work. I think it is part of looking at things as they are. Often my photographs delve into abstraction but the real, sometimes unsightly, aspects of life are still present; there is the bit of animal tissue floating in the soup or, as in another project, the dirt spots on the window.
As a younger person, I read Tolstoy and loved the multidimensional nature of his characters. The people in Tolstoy’s novels have the possibility for both good and evil and this makes one believe in the truthfulness of the writing, to believe that something real from life has been crafted in to the novel. I hope that the same is true in my photographs, that I have allowed the subject to bring with it those aspects from life that might not seem to fit with the estheticized object, so that through discord an authentic view of life is captured. The meat pictures are meant to say, it is a chicken or a pig or the fat rendered from the pig’s body and it is delicious and beautiful and horrible.
I came of age as an artists making sculpture and looking at the work of Joseph Beuys and others. I saw food as a legitimate material for art making and I made my first sculptures and photographs from fruit in the mid 1990’s. That work was made as sculpture and the photograph was a means to document the work. The food pictures from the 2010’s are an outgrowth of this earlier work but are in the tradition of two-dimensional art, and draw from both photography and painting.
All the food pictures came about either before or after I cooked something and when I saw the possibility for a photograph.
extracts from nature
These photographs were taken in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The work explores the wild areas of the park, places where the plants and trees grow tightly together in thickets and have the feeling of wilderness.
I have always been attracted to the untended vegetation found in urban areas. I grew up in San Francisco and I have wonderful memories of my childhood explorations of the city and the special pleasure I found in vacant lots and other over grown areas that were neglected and out of the way. There is a kind of privacy and ownership in these places. One can escape from the self-conscious mind and enter a world of one’s own.
The spirit of romanticism is also in this work. I think of the great works in landscape painting and take them as my inspiration. I think more of Casper David Friedrich than of Robert Adams, but they both live as references in my visual lexicon. The work, however, does not have the outward looking, god inspired viewpoint seen in Freidrich nor the realism found in Adams’ views of the degraded landscape.
In these extracts from nature, the views are blocked and we cannot see beyond. In A Lovely Constraint the low branches in the foreground and the blown out space in the upper area limit the view. All the pictures are either lighter or darker than what the eye could see. These steps toward abstraction move the work inward, toward a personal reading of landscape.
nature inside and out
These photographs look at nature from within human space. They are little landscapes seen in an oblique way. In the first picture a bit of sky is seen from a glass window. The next photograph is a screen in a Japanese home that is decorated with trees and mountains.
The pictures cover a range of ways that nature is seen from within houses and the garden. Some pictures are playful like the rug picture, Snake in the Rug, which is followed by Snake Skin Wall Paper (pictures 6&7), another similar in mood is Horse with the Broken Leg (8).
The last three pictures were taken inside a building, along a back stairwell. There was a pigeon nesting against the glass, pictures (18). The two following pictures show the habitat.
oral (intimate artifacts)
The poles of intimacy and repulsion are the two contrasting sides in this body of work. The work examines objects which have been in contact with the mouth.
The mouth is one of the intimate orifices of the body. Through it we receive and give pleasure. It is also the wellhead for the body’s saliva, the fluid that moistens the mouth and throat, carries our DNA and spreads our viruses.
The Interior Pictures began in the home I grew up in and were taken after my mother’s death and before the house was sold. After the house was cleared of furnishings, I began looking very closely at the evidence of my family’s life in the house. I saw things like the wear on the kitchen cabinets created by years of hands opening and closing the doors. In the garage there were oil stains on the concrete and the leaves that had blown in from the garden. In the starkness of an empty house, the traces left behind became evocative and powerful reminders of what was absent.
All of these pictures were made in places in transition after the occupants were gone.
The worn objects are both junk and relic. They are what remains and as such are a form of contemporary archeology focused on the ordinary. The intent of the work is to recognize and reinterpret the often poignant detail of everyday life. The heart of the work is both a curiosity for what once was and a longing for what is past.
shelves
The Shelf Pictures are a little grouping from the Interior Pictures. In each picture there is evidence of a former user. This might be the little nicks in the wood in Mahogany Shelf or repaired shelf paper seen in another.
sleep
These pictures were taken of my husband and our dog in the evenings while they slept in various parts of our house over a period of seven years. In the room light, Ed could be clearly seen and I found his postures and expressions both humorous and poignant. I was struck by the vulnerability of the sleeper who is seen without benefit of the composure normal to the conscious state. When we sleep we are strangely absent and defenseless and there is a strong suggestion of mortality as seen in the sleeper’s slumping body.
This work is also a study in daily life. In the pictures one sees the objects that the sleeper was making use of just prior to falling asleep, the remnants of food and empty containers.The clutter changes but never goes away.
The pictures were taken with a medium format film camera and are long exposures. In several pictures the sleeper moved during the exposure and nodding can be seen in two of the photos; Sleeping Man with Reddi Whip and Sleeping Man Nodding. In Sleeping Man’s Ghost, the sleeper awoke and left the room,leaving only his ghost image. The pictures were taken as I found the scene; only lights were added or taken away.