MEDIUM: Digital Illustration
DESCRIPTION:
18″ x 26″ digital print on paper with gold ink and embossment, 2018
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
I seek to make visual the unseen traumas and anxieties women often carry with them as a result of living in a patriarchal society. These traumas and anxieties manifest themselves through surreal transformations—indelible manifestations that irrevocably alter the landscape of the body. Through these transformations, I explore a facet of the construction of female identity—the thousand little deaths that change women throughout their lives and the residue these deaths leave behind. I juxtapose uncomfortable and subtly violent images with elegant and sensual imagery that references the golden age of illustration. This recognizable aesthetic invokes a sense of familiarity, but the surface beauty cannot entirely gloss over the unsettling metamorphosis beneath, draping a sense of dissonance over the work. Through this dissonance, I cultivate the creeping discomfort that comes with the unlikely union of contradictions: the uncanny parallels between beauty and repulsion, eroticism and death, feminine and horror.
