Installations
Dis-Mememberment and Re-Membering
In this body of work I look at post-memory, the memory of trauma experienced through others. I am Jewish and also German. These two identities are rendered difficult through the events of recent history. They feel unreconcilable, like disparate parts within myself, partly not my own. And they beckon to be re-integrated, re-membered into my own life so they can make sense within the contemporary context I live in.
My installations focus on memory as a mending process. Their elements are typically bodies, parts of the body, or skin-like structures that have a scar. Their severed or wounded surfaces are visibly mended, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes in an orderly even decorative way. The body and its scar serve as a container, the mended scar as a reminder of what is contained. Wounding and mending co-habitate the same surface that holds memory. Surrounding fixtures, structures and spaces serve as aids to the mending process. They extend the mending of surfaces and body parts into structural and spatial re-groupings. re-membering them into new configurations. While the wounding never disappears a new context is found for it to reside in.
I am interested in fixtures, structures and spaces that have their own context, that bring their own history with them. And I am looking for an activation and morphing of these meanings, by inserting my wounded containers into them. My installations have been in a former butcher house, an office lobby, an attic.
The bodies in this series are paper casts taken from plaster casts, mannequins or directly from the body.
In this body of work I look at post-memory, the memory of trauma experienced through others. I am Jewish and also German. These two identities are rendered difficult through the events of recent history. They feel unreconcilable, like disparate parts within myself, partly not my own. And they beckon to be re-integrated, re-membered into my own life so they can make sense within the contemporary context I live in.
My installations focus on memory as a mending process. Their elements are typically bodies, parts of the body, or skin-like structures that have a scar. Their severed or wounded surfaces are visibly mended, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes in an orderly even decorative way. The body and its scar serve as a container, the mended scar as a reminder of what is contained. Wounding and mending co-habitate the same surface that holds memory. Surrounding fixtures, structures and spaces serve as aids to the mending process. They extend the mending of surfaces and body parts into structural and spatial re-groupings. re-membering them into new configurations. While the wounding never disappears a new context is found for it to reside in.
I am interested in fixtures, structures and spaces that have their own context, that bring their own history with them. And I am looking for an activation and morphing of these meanings, by inserting my wounded containers into them. My installations have been in a former butcher house, an office lobby, an attic.
The bodies in this series are paper casts taken from plaster casts, mannequins or directly from the body.
November 9
The scars in this works address personal wounds as well as cultural, interpersonal and historic ones. Metaphorically the scaring happens on my own skin as in the large paper wall "Novemebr 9, that is inscribed with a birthday I share with larger events of German history (Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the wall in 1989). But skin also serves as a cover and like a blanket it can serve to protect but also to conceal.
I use handmade paper to visually focus on skin as a site of wounding, memory and healing. Paper can be forged to translucent membranes and stretched over surfaces as casts. It can have structural armatures or expressive materials embedded into it and text/imaged added to its surface. Paper can have the feel of the vulnerable yet of strength. It is organic with a will of it's own yet the potential to be bent to an expressive form. And it can be made into volumes, containers.
See this link with captions from exhibit "Wounded Landscapes" at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Spring 2014: http://nau-tv.com/Play/1847
Novemebr 9, 1938/52/89, handmade paper, 9' x 18'