heads
Easily read as abstract plays of color and texture, the Heads are in fact a first step into content. The abstraction of “face” is the most basic of human languages, the foundation of religions, and the first and most common experience of recognition of signs. No matter the language we speak, our anthropomorphic instinct makes us see faces in the clouds, in the trees, makes us imbue the natural world with human content.
With these works, I’ve asked myself questions about the value and purpose of content by playing with the most primitive and minimal gesture into figuration I can.
The shapes, or planes, that build the faces into space are covered with painterly brush patterns that emphasize the hand and reference the raking of zen gardens. Using a variety of brushes - some meant for painting, others meant for cleaning or sweeping or lint removal - I allow the expression and movement of my hand to serve multiple functions - as primal gesture, to simultaneously create decorative surfaces, and to incorporate the practice of presentness in the tradition of zen.
As a little girl, I would play with the fabric swatches that my interior-designer grandmother would collect for her projects - two-dimensional stacks of pattern and texture that would later be transformed into a three-dimensional environment in space. I can’t help but see in these works those stacks of fabric — my own version of childhood building blocks of pattern and color that I would move around into various configurations on the comforter of my grandma’s bed.