Questions of Origin
Avondale / Hot Skin
Cycles (2017 - ) investigates women’s history and considers the structural underpinnings women have lived in across time and culture and how they cycle and rhyme. Inspired by archeological non-fiction, gender studies, poetry, art history, and personal experience, Cycles weaves a fragmented and non-linear exploration of what being a woman means historically and personally. Although limited by an individual lens, the series is not intended to limit what defines womanhood and welcomes ambiguous and broad interpretations of woman-identified and non-binary relations to the work. The complicated layers of the construction of gender mimic the overtly constructed nature of the images and the diverse approaches such as projection, performance, installation, fibers, still life, and landscape. Both constructed and natural, personal and cultural, private and public, internalized and external.
The series surveys various topics and themes, including the body (ideas of land, water, ritual, fertility, and worship), cultural barriers and violence, interpretations of female-identified poets, and historical figures and events. The most specific personal experiences inspiring the work include disordered eating, fertility issues, and cultural pressures.
What does being a woman mean? After years of exploration, I still find no clear answer… except maybe everything just is, and isn’t, consistent in its contradictions.
Learn more about Cycles:
Interview on Lenscratch
Interview on Catalyst Interviews