Artist's Statement

The impetus for this particular set of works came from several contemporary poems that I amassed over the course of a year, all of them dealing with subject matter around archetypal female figures – historical, religious, or mythical women. I found it very intriguing that so many different writers had chosen to write about these looming cultural figures in the voice of the first person. I realized that the women that were the subject matter are often, as we know them, voiceless, and that the authors had taken the opportunity to give them a voice. What I wanted to do was to illustrate the words.

The piece to illustrate the poem Demeter, by Carol Ann Duffy, was the first piece that I worked on, and is also my favorite work. It was a serious challenge. The poem is deeply moving. To start, I concentrated on several different lines to structure the piece. The first part was the background, which I chose to make very dark, based on the images presented in the beginning of the poem, “winter and hard earth,” “cold stone room.” The portrait part of the drawing was based on my personal emotional response to the poem, how I understood the character. The figure in the background represents Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, who comes into play at the end of the poem: “I saw her at last, walking,/ my daughter, my girl, across the fields,/ in bare feet, bringing all spring’s flowers/ to her mother’s house.” This figure is also a reference to the French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon, who was a great inspiration to me throughout this whole process. The figure comes directly from his pastel drawing “Oriental Woman,” as well as the flowers around her, which come from a pastel drawing of wildflowers. More generally, the choices I made in regard to color and composition were greatly influenced by his works.

Other works were less specific in regard to their poetic motivation. Some of the written works I used did not have such distinct physical imagery. In those cases, I worked even more from a personal response, using colors and images that came out of the emotions evoked by the poetry.

I think my best work is the piece that illustrates Half-Hanged Mary, a powerful piece by Margaret Atwood about a woman who was hanged during the Salem witch trials, but survived. This piece visually marks the point where I began to have a deeper understanding of the printing process that I was using. I started manipulating the inks in a more complex way, and used a cut-out to create the background of the piece. This was the first piece . This was the third piece that I worked on. I wanted the colors to be brighter than in the previous pieces, but not overwhelmingly so – I was not working with a cheerful subject. The tone of the poem, particularly the second half, called for an abstraction. Sections such as “wind seethes in the leaves around/ me the trees exude night/ birds night birds yell inside/ my ears like stabbed hearts…” and “The cosmos unravels from my mouth,/ all fullness, all vacancy” seemed to be essential to the overall effect of the poem. I chose the composition in order to communicate this mood, as well as the colors, in both the background and the portrait portion. Birds are an important symbol in the poem, and I used that more literally, using a flock of birds both as a symbol and as a device to create space.

While the poems were an integral part of my personal creative process, I want the visual works to be able to stand on their own, which is part of why I chose not to display the poems alongside of them. However, because they were so important, they are available if the audience chooses to seek them out.