We’ve been remodeling our house – every room, it’s been going on since March & it has been a bit of a challenge to live around-not to mention finding space to keep creating. Some time in July, I had to move my last studio surface & transitioned to a card table. The limited space forced me to work small so I started experimenting with collage, drawing, ink, and acrylic washes. About this same time, fatigue of politics was also setting in. I had also been creating monotype’s of cactus and desert scenes on the gel plate and working on my lawn-chair series of paintings. I’m a bit multi-threaded when I create – I need to have multiple things going on at once.
While moving my studio contents (yet again) I found a book of old political buttons that I had been holding on to. I decided to cut cactus pads out of the pages of the political button book and collage them onto randomly painted pieces of paper that I had used to explore mark making. This led into two threads, the Invasive Species series of landscapes and a mixed media thread involving the feminine experience in the political realm (with a few lawn chairs thrown in for good measure). Here are a few examples from the Invasive Species series:
Invasive Species addresses frustration with the political process (and likely fatigue from repeatedly moving things from room-to-room) and the unwanted intrusions into our daily life from ads, commercials, texts, emails, mail, door-to-door and the news cycle (political, commercial, or otherwise). As the pieces evolved, I began to explore generally, unwanted intrusions into nature and solitude. This is an ongoing series (as are most of my series). They’re not yet available for sale, but will be posted sometime after January 1.
The other thread followed a similar train of inquiry with an emphasis on the female experience in the political realm. The female figure is prominent in a lot of my work and the mixed media pieces in this series represent my reaction to yet more “talking heads” (politicians, the press, etc., from ALL sides of the political spectrum) telling women how to think, act, live/behave and grouping (and judging women within each group), and chastising, criticizing, name calling any deviation. Here are a few examples of this thread in my mixed media explorations.
