Most of my work in sculptural installation, object sculpture, painting, drawing, poetry, performance, film, and exhibition curating, has developed a specific focus as my life experience encountered the mainstream ideologies of the master narrative of western culture. More specifically, a thread seemingly runs through the work: “how-we-treat-the-other.” In the early work, this thread addressed millennia-old conventional cultural references to women as an “other,” as in the societal language practice utilizing exclusionary the concept of “ ‘mankind’ as opposed to the more inclusive ‘humankind,’ as in the denial of the right to vote, and so forth.
From this point of departure, the work evolved into an eco-feminist narrative, addressing how contemporary society too often acts toward nature as if it were an “other,” a force to be feared, destroyed or paved over (insects, marshes, coyotes), controlled (pesticides), manipulated (agri-business), manicured (lawns), exploited and commodified (elephants, fossil fuels, water), rather than to be integrated and learned from.
All of these “others” are marketed as if they were threats, or in opposition to “us,” –when in fact we are inextricably linked in an ecosystem where everyone and everything IS ultimately us. The Fertile Soil Series 2-D and 3-D embodies these concepts.
Chronologically, the ‘other’ in my work appeared as the African American in the United States. The two curatorial projects “Art Against Racism,” and the “A True History of Rhode Island,” unveiling the slave-trading historical roots of Rhode Island, are emblematic of this ‘race’ relationship of the ‘other.’
Having viewed the Vietnam war on television as a child, the onset of the first Gulf War immediately piqued responses of moral outrage and so I took up my previous interest in Islamic architecture and peace activism and redirected them to ‘the enemy’ as the ‘other,’ (example, Memorial to the Iraqi People” I and II, and the Camouflage Series). Exposed: the media view foisted upon us that the enemy is an object outside of ourselves. As we see the faces of the Iraqi, as we recognize the glamourization of military might in the Camouflage Series we may be reminded of the ‘other’ as our own human relative.
The Deeksha Series does not focus directly on the concept of the ‘other.’ This series evolves from the new world’s recognition through quantum physics of the oneness of existence – all of existence as energy.
Although my artwork derives from socially and environmentally conscious sources, it intentionally integrates the power of color and design with meaning and content.
Through strategies of beauty and seduction, utilizing the formal properties of art: spatial arrangement and composition, geometric shape and form, light and shadow, repetition and symmetry, the work brings into focus an awareness of human existence.
These art investigations struggle to extract us from the socio-cultural traps of prejudice, bigotry, militarism, and environmental desecration. They often recall examples of learning and unlearning with regard to human, nature, nation and spirit relations. Cultural memory is so easily fragmented that it barely exists.
The sculptural works and paintings often evoke loss, not victory, within a haunting beauty that draws the viewer forward to know more.
The thread through the work is therefore human inter-connectedness, -earth and relation as a single organism. All of these art pieces are rooted in devotional regard and responsibility to all, -human, animal, mineral and their irreplaceable roles in the ecosystem.
I trust my work introduces the capacity for compassion and putting oneself in the shoes of another.
This environmentally and peace conscious journey may have started with the loss of my favorite childhood woods to the asphalt paving industry, and to the reading of Anne Frank, or seeing Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream,” but I was especially attuned to war, because I grew up listening to my father’s World War II stories on a weekly if not daily basis starting from childhood. Though he was a Purple Heart veteran, I will never forget his decision to give up his rifle while on the front line. The stories that have come from this gentle man have heightened my awareness regarding the concept of an enemy. This is the seed of my interest, which has sensitized me and made my creative flow unceasing and unstoppable. Much of this body of installation and performance work brings to recognition our culture’s inability to see, connect with, or interact with the “other,” consequently clinging to anger, retaliation, envy, hatred and war as a norm to not be questioned, when available to us is ”the strength to love within the community of humankind. The work questions a world where our thought processes are mediated for us, leading to a fundamental difficulty and collective failure to articulate thoughts outside of retribution, disregard, and domination.
I use the voice of the material as primary mode of communication, or perhaps the voice of the material uses me, as the choice of medium arrives unconsciously. The materials that present themselves to me: wild grasses, kudzu vines, seeds, bed sheets, lipstick cases, bullet cases, roses, herbs, electrical wire, etc., communicate meaning, memories, and associations. Context is important: vines juxtaposed to electrical wire evoke a nature/culture dichotomy, for example.
Sculptural installation brings into relationship, within a single environment, seemingly unrelated elements separated by historical time or by culturally dismissive divides, to present a multilayered story of “the whole.” Through relational sculptural environments, we often have the opportunity to move beyond short-term thinking and inaction, we learn ways to reconnect fragmented aspects of history and geography, relearning our role in the world. It is in this way my artistic expression often recalls examples of learning and unlearning cultural memory. It is through this work that I fell in love with Kingian Nonviolence Philosophy and Methodology, that strand of nonviolence derived from the strategic lifework of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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