Artist Statement

My paintings and sculptures are about women and how we define ourselves in today's culture. Issues of family, work, domesticity, sexuality and gender are explored through contemporary notions of female-ness and female power with an absurdist's dark sense of humor. My subjects are strong contemporary women; women who take chances, women who dare to audaciously break the rules in the game of the sexes, and fantasies about them.

The Hundred Headless Women, is a wall installation of wood burned kitchen cutting boards, which was originally created in 2001 for The Torture Museum in my traveling interactive exhibition, The Sideshow of the Absurd. New wood burned drawings have continued to the present. The name pays homage to Max Ernst’s brilliant novel of collages and engravings, The Hundred Headless Woman.

In general, each cutting board is burned with a drawing of women in perilous situations, recalling the invincible and sexy magician’s assistant who is sawn in half, turned into an animal and back, or stabbed with a knife. The heroine is always smiling, and she always survives.

In 1998, researching carnivals and sideshows, I discovered one special illusion that helped spark the concept: The Headless Woman magic trick. About the same time, I read an article in the New York Times titled, The Full Body Transplant. It reported that the head of one monkey was connected by tubes and sutures to the trunk of another monkey and showed unmistakable signs of consciousness.

I began to question a society of empty heads detached from reality; a culture that emphasizes beauty and youth, and avoids the truth. I remembered phrases such as “You have to suffer to be beautiful” and “As long as you’re pretty, you don’t have to be smart.”

When I began the series, I naively believed in the power of women to overcome the perils they might encounter. But as my awareness evolved concerning the denigrated level of women in the world, their mutilation, their suicides and deaths caused by a repressive society, my work took on an inevitably darker tone.

The Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University and Ma Nose Studios, Aspen, Colorado jointly published a limited hand made edition of the images. The book is dedicated to all the women throughout the world whose lowly status, appalling circumstances and hardships are a source of pain and inspiration to the artist.