ARTIST'S STATEMENT

My current body of work expands upon an idea that has been present in my life and my artwork since childhood: an interest in the complex issue of body image- primarily in relation to women. I am acutely aware of our particular relationships to food, sexuality, identity and the media via the body. This issue goes far deeper than notions of ugly vs. pretty or fat vs. thin, and involves many complicated and paradoxical feelings of simultaneous desire and repulsion, pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability, illness and vitality.

The women I draw are often pulled from images in magazines or fashion spreads. In the slick photographs I use as source material, these women represent "ideal" or model bodies in contemporary culture. By recontextualizing them and altering their images, I deform (or re-form) these "models" - not in a horrible way, but in a way that the women themselves seem to have conradictory feelings about. Grotesque/beautiful long hair sprouts from unlikely orfices, huge clumsy/powerful hands grow in place of average ones, and strange decorative internal organs are externalized.

Through this process of combining current, media-popularized images of the female body with other seductive/repulsive imagery referencing sexuality, illness, bodily functions, etc., I hope to open up their original meanings and allow for a more complex reading of the body and its image in my work and in life.

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