When I was a child, my father played the organ at church and my family went every Sunday to mass. I attended Catholic school all of my life, my very religious grandmother lived with us and reigned over our family with a rigid notion of right and wrong, and I distinctly recall visiting my mother’s parents and walking in on my grandparents sitting beneath the giant portrait of Jesus of the Sacred Heart while saying the rosary in hushed and chanting voices that both terrified and mesmerized me. These things have yet to leave my consciousness, and I am interested in making work that responds to these memories of my Catholic upbringing.
I am fascinated by Christian saints, particularly female martyrs, and the Virgin Mary and have found that their stories of passionate devotion to Christ, their denial of worldly pleasures and the destruction of their physical bodies through torture be a rich resource upon which to draw for my work. The fragmentation and deformation of saint’s bodies resonates with me as I struggle to make peace with my own upbringing that demonized the sensuality of the body and placed value on restraint and self-denial. I am intrigued by a religion that tries to deny the messy reality of the body, yet seems to embrace the grotesque in depictions of saintly martyrdom, in the passion of Christ, and in a weekly re-enactment of the consumption of body and blood. I wonder about the persistent connection I have to a religion that offers these dualities, and I am drawn to the beauty of its iconography and inherent message of love, and at the same time repelled by the brutal and restrictive way it often negotiates humanity.
Most recently I have been altering slip-cast statues of saints and the Virgin Mary through combining them with parts of other molds. I replace the heads with heads of other animals, I mask over faces with colored under-glazes or gold luster and in doing so hope to subvert the idea of how these icons function in the context of religious statuary and Catholic beliefs. I leave the seams exposed to echo the mold making process, but also to suggest the fragmentation of the martyred saint’s body, and its reduction to a collection of parts. I also use the seams to frame intimate spaces in which to carve, hollow out or fill with color, the placement of these spaces shifts from figure to figure, creating a visual narrative across a congregation of individuals.
My work reflects my attraction to the space between the beautiful and the monstrous, between the vulgarity of the body and the purity of the spirit, between the order of ritual and the irrational nature of faith