Can You Hear Me Now?
An Evolving Series of Feminist Works
“Can You Hear Me Now?" is an evolving new body of work that includes drawings, paintings, fiber arts, and videos all one a single theme. The works examine American women’s struggle to have their voices heard, and uncover the societal barriers that prevent women from achieving their full potential.
Several of the works acknowledge that progress has been made in the fight for women’s rights, while also recognizing that more than 100 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, women have yet to achieve equality. Often women's idea's and accomplishments are invisible, unheard, lost to history, and essentially "washed away" from view.
Each of the artworks in this series employs some form of disrupted realism, and frequently feature figures or faces in impossible or unreal settings. This allows a viewer a more personal way to connect with the art and narrative, without spelling out the specifics too clearly. Viewers flesh out the deeper meanings from their personal life experiences.
Life Sentence
Charcoal and Mixed Media. 26x27 inches [SOLD]
For most of our lives we exist in a “borderland,” tentatively peering over the border’s edge, relegated to the sidelines, or simply afraid of a leap into the unknown. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua writes, “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a step edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
Here, a woman is contained within an environment with the ghosts of her memories and private thoughts. She is peering out from a window that represents the unnatural boundary between her world and the vast world beyond.
Time
Graphite and Ink. 18x23 inches.
This drawing was inspired by Sylvia Plath's Sonnet to Time:
Today we move in jade and cease with garnet
Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark
Our years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet
We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the dark.
But outside the diabolic steel of this
Most plastic-windowed city, I can hear
The lone wind raving in the gutter, his
Voice crying exclusion in my ear.
So cry for the pagan girl left picking olives
Beside a sunblue sea, and mourn the flagon
Raised to toast a thousand kings, for all gives
Sorrow; weep for the legendary dragon.
Time is a great machine of iron bars
That drains eternally the milk of stars.
Entangled
Charcoal and Graphite. 24x18 inches [SOLD]
A young woman engulfed in an oversized raincoat, curled up into a fetal position, and immobilized in a web of ropes. Perhaps she is bound by fear, or trauma, or external limits placed on her. While there are charcoal smudges to indicate that she has swung back and forth and fought the entanglement, she now seems to be calm and at peace with her situation. It might seem that she has simply given up and accepted the ropes that hold her back. Or perhaps that she has donned the quiet and uncomplaining mask women often wear. In creating this drawing I hoped that viewers might consider questions like these through the lens of their own personal life stories.
Calm in the Storm
Charcoal, Graphite, and Ink. 17x13 inches.
In this image originally titled “Untangling the Past,” a young woman does not sit passively enduring the literal and figurative rough seas that surround her. She focuses on her task with a calmness and strength.
Collateral Damage
Mixed Media Drawing. 22x16 inches.
Collateral Damage is from a series of feminist works that explore a disrupted reality. Women's figures are placed in abstract or unreal situations to create emotional narratives that cannot be distilled into words. I often reference women’s struggles to be heard and the need for women’s empowerment around the world. “Collateral Damage” intentionally contrasts what might be a white party dress with the black hands that seem to be covered in soot or blood. I ask the viewer to imagine the narratives behind the silent image and evidence of damage.
Restoring Herstory
Graphite and mixed media
drawing approx. 17x22 inches. Panel 20x26 inches
This is a drawing of my mother in her WWII R.A.F. Bomber Command uniform. She is drawn on pages taken from The Settlement Cookbook, a book she was given to teach her how to be a “good American housewife” upon arriving in the U.S. A drawing of her military logo and an old-fashioned stocking clip float beside her, no longer used. Painted red stitches hold these in place. Reused rough nails attach the work to an old wooden panel.
Hot Cold Empathy Gap
Oil over Acrylic on Canvas. 48x36 inches [SOLD]
Originally painted for the Attleboro Arts Museum's exhibition, Scylla: The Ugly Truth Revealed in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read, the work interprets Scylla the six-headed monster as the emotional and behavioral “monsters” that can lurk within individuals. Because of the discord in today’s America, I have been wondering about the hideous monsters that lie hidden within us—what makes them become activated?
I interpreted the ugliness of Scylla through this lens, using the imagery of a swirling storm of oceanic emotion. The ghostly faces weave in and out of reality as different facets of monsters within are revealed. The tearful monster is the fear that overpowers us, breaks us, weakens our resolve and makes us incapable of actions our rational brain tells us are right and true. Other monsters reveal aggressive violence, or sniping gossip. Still others are subversively cruel. One extends her hand like a wall saying “no entry” and covers her eyes to the misery she is causing. Another, refuses to hear about anyone’s suffering. Human understanding is “state-dependent.” The silent monster at the bottom exhibits an emotional paralysis that may unexpectedly make her the worst monster of all. As Martin Luther King said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Chapter 2:
The Weight and Wait
Acrylic on Unbleached Canvas, with fabric, threads, and rusted metal. 52x28 inches.
This monochromatic acrylic painting includes textile elements and found metal objects.The work observes that despite progress in women’s empowerment over the past 100 years, much remains to be done. The rusted broken chains slipping almost off the canvas are a metaphor for the first chapter in gender equality - the ratification of the 19th amendment.
The story continues in “Chapter 2: The Weight and Wait” referencing the ever-present weight of the inequalities that still burden women. These are imagined as 3D bags of weights that circle around the central figure, like a swarm of wasps. Chapter 2 also references the "wait" for the parity to come in chapter 3.
The figure is stitched through the painting with dots of red thread—like tiny droplets of blood. The use of fabric and threads references generations of anonymous, poorly-paid women laboring in the Garment District. In a small rectangle, a "sampler" recalls the long history of females assigned to the acceptable feminine occupation of needlework. But rather than a trite “home sweet home” message, this sampler asks viewers a question about justice.
Washed Away
“Washed Away” is a hand-drawn video utilizing very limited materials: two sheets of paper, charcoal, eraser, and a cell-phone. Its vertical format suggests a looking through a window, offering a hint of voyeurism. It speaks of human life, desires, and intertwines the many meanings of water— especially its life-giving and life-taking qualities. With 60% of our bodies composed of water, humans are water-based creatures. 70% of our planet's surface is covered water, and it is essential to our very existence. We develop into human form protected by the water in our mother's womb. Each night, we exhale water into the air around us. When we are overwhelmed by emotion, salty wet tears overflow our eyes. Water is used in our cleansing rituals and sacred ceremonies. And yet it also has the power to destroy out lives, and to wipe out villages and entire cities.
The drawings in this video recognize the small scale of a human life in comparison to the eternal power of water. The immeasurable forces of water existed long before humans ever walked the face of the earth. And the throbbing pulsing cycles of tides and waves will continue long after we are gone. The drawings speak of transitions to the eternal. We live for a moment, and then are gone, changed, and consumed to be formed anew.