Text Cutouts

Marrying text, photography, and collage, the ‘Text Cutouts’ reexamine recognized symbols and components of femininity.  Taking these words and phrases or images and materials associated with artistry or femininity and divorcing them from their traditional application is in an effort to rediscover them through renewed aesthetics of balance, color, and form.  Appropriated artworks become textural as letters overflow with cut floral elements.  These floral illustrations, photographs, and drawings conjure the memory of my childhood; redolent with the scent of wisteria, peonies, and fresh cut roses from my Mother and Grandmother’s gardens. As long as I can remember, an oil painting of a peony hung above the fireplace that my Mom painted. That memory functions as a kind of polestar. I’m engaging with that image in a new way. Finding new forms and techniques of design and photography and collage through which to make it sing again.