Say My Name

Just finished an installation piece, called SAY MY NAME. Really incredible in so many ways.

I guess I've found my niche in that I really really love creating installation pieces. The process is both a response to a personal environmental issue and a dialogue with a viewer during the exposure to the piece and after the fact as well with me and in the internal world of the viewer. This one resulted in an uncomfortable feeling for many as it raised issues we'd all rather not talk about any more which can lay the foundation for more of the same.

The inception of this piece began to some degree during my daughter's miscarriage experience. There we were, my daughter, son-in-law and myself, in the hospital trying to assimilate and deal with a very very trying experience and not lose it. I had to remember everything. Through the whole thing we all felt that there was a no name issue. No one would say baby, or embryo or fetus or child or her or him not even it hardly. There was this amorphous, unmouthed word almost a preconcept that could form no word or thought. Even after the baby was extracted and put in a steel dish a nurse whisked it away from me as I approached to look so it can be removed to nonexistence, a tissue, a specimen to be disposed and unheard of. It was then I knew that I would come back and address this in my art.

A few weeks later I was hosting a local cable television show called ASK YOUR DOCTOR which can be viewed at askyourdoctor.tv. After we signed off the air the doctor/friend I had interviewed asked me if I noticed anything interesting about the anatomy book he had used for demonstrative purposes during the show and I shrugged and noted that the drawings were pretty good. He nodded and told me it was a banned book and was written by a known and avowed Nazi and that it had been in circulation in the States even in the 90's. I was taken back a bit and weeks later felt a bit haunted by that book and him. Here was the son of a Methodist minister, very involved with his church and with christian matters carting this book of dissected Holocaust victims and using them to explain things to unsuspecting people.

It was here that I saw some similarities in that these victims who once had names, families, lives, favorite shoes had been reduced to an image with no name no hint of the being that once inhabited that body. The breeding ground for what is probably only the first in a series of pieces dealing with SAY MY NAME had been formed.

Unvanquished

...nearly completed claywork for Unvanquished began in April of this year in the Loire Valley in France . I started researching for this just after my last showing of Requiem for the Pawns of War when I met a Canadian researcher with the Alberta Council of Women's Studies. She gave me a quick overview of the magnitude and severity of the problem. I was immediately interested in getting involved. When I told Kate of my interest in pursuing this further she asked if I wanted to look at homicides or suicides. Whatever I was about to say stuck in my throat as I absorbed the magnitude of her question. This piece came to be as a collaborative effort with my model and Martine Vaugel, a phenomenally supportive and talented being who has supported me whole-heartedly in manifesting my artistic vision.

Thin BLue Line-Domestic Violence

Have been working on a new piece called Thin Blue Line-Black Eyed Madonna. Initial interviews have been done and after speaking to counselors at The Network for Sexual Violence it seemed that the crux of the problem centers around "control". I don't know that I am in agreement with this yet as I look at line drawings of children that they use to indicate where someone touched them inappropriately or worse.
Control has now taken on a new meaning with sinister overtones. One doesn't think of control as a bad thing when operating a car or plane or a nuclear reactor or when walking your child across the street but in a relationship look out it is a veritable minefield.
Control in a relationship has driven many off the brink more often than any other element. This bad control then starts one down the slippery slope into the cauldron of blame and regret. I think this is the direction my studies are beginning to take me.

Iraq Body Count-Requiem for the Pawns of War

When I created Requiem for the Pawns of War, one of sources of inspiration came from listening to conversations in a doctor's lounge at one of my hospitals. How can so many people who have presumably sworn themselves to helping others be so willing to bomb the undeserving or even fail to question if there ever is a justification for bombing? Now so much time has elapsed that the same parties all sit in front of the tv screen and watch the latest Paris Hilton Crisis without giving a second thought to the people who have their electricity rationed and have to live with their own people bursting into flames and nails which will take out another 10 or 30 of the undeserving. Our own children there have to relive now the lessons from other conflicts and come back home scarred and silent or angry and knotted up as they walk our streets with images carried home from another country like a mental virus waiting to infect their lives.

Let's keep the reasons for this invasion alive and look at what we have been told. The longer it goes on the more we become numb and accustomed to conflict. Can you believe there was a Hundred Years War at one time?

Thanks
Zen