About

“Monster, Mirror, (M)Other” Performance, costume, sound, mirror paintings, wall markings, 2023

“On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” - Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (207)

“The process of becoming a mother is a developmental passage where a woman transitions through pre-conception, pregnancy and birth, surrogacy or adoption, to the postnatal period and beyond. The exact length of matrescence is individual, recurs with each child, and may arguably last a lifetime. The scope of the changes encompass multiple domains --bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual-- and can be likened to the developmental push of adolescence.” -Dr. Aurelie Athan, clinical psychologist

Monster, Mirror, (M)Other continues the trajectory of my practice using text as a conceptual framework for creating paintings and performance to offer a participatory space for engagement between myself and the viewer. As a way to counteract the classic maternal self-sacrifice, I collaborate with my children, using them as “mark-making tools” and extracting “text” (memories, moments, recordings, audio and photographs) from everyday life as a way to focus equally on the psychic shifts of myself as mother and the developmental stages of my children. In essence, I am attempting to radically blend my art-making and motherhood practices conceptually. The text that I have loosely utilized thematically is the book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, a story about a young boy whose encounter with monsters is a metaphor for experiencing the chaos of internal emotions. The monster, an interaction with the abject place within oneself, is a place where, as Julia Kristeva suggests, “meaning collapses.” My understanding of meaning and truth has been destabilized through the process of matresence and that disorientation has been expressed in pushing form, language, text, and the body as a mark-making tool, to their limits, in fact, beyond their limits into absurdity and non-sense. Encountering meaninglessness has meant befriending a new monster, a great “other,” an unraveling that has led back to the beginning of myself and my story simultaneously as my children begin their own stories. We become “others” together, staring these monstrous new versions of ourselves in the eye, connecting with our bodies, without words, and making sense through the texts we read, remember, learn, and form together.