Heavy in White

The scenarios I construct emphasize the irony of body-consciousness. Small and heavy women cavort nude in celebratory displays of eating and dressing, challenging our ideals on weight, beauty and sexuality. Playing off Vargas pin-up girls, my dress-up plays on sexuality, celebrating how a woman views herself. My work shows that every woman has import, regardless of her weight or shape.

After exhibiting my photography in museums and galleries, I recently became interested in applying photography to create 3-dimensional photo-sculptural objects. I’m now creating objects to make people smile and provoke thought. For me this has the same value as producing a photograph that hangs on the wall.

I let the objects themselves dictate scenarios and I shoot photographs specific to the objects that will use them. In doing so, my photographs take-on greater meaning as part of the object than when standing alone.

I carefully tone my prints with tea and gold to help achieve their dreamlike glow. I also design my own objects and assemblies, and use teams of fabricators, jewelers and carpenters to bring my art-object concepts to life.

Globed Transparency and Gold Leaf

The Globe series came from my desire to see luminosity within darkness. I express this with a globe of varying sizes reappearing in a series of images, some of which I covered in gold leaf to exude warm light.

With this work, my intention was to display the glowing life force that connects us to our inner selves and one to another. When I started photographing with the globe I knew I had to make light itself the source rather than placing the light on to something. The beaded lines of light in the pictures symbolize this connection. The visual result, when see on the wall, is like electricity without a plug. The light goes on from one to another, one lifetime to the next. The nine individual gold leaf images titled” Fireball” is a good example of this. The work is framed with thin pieces of plexi placed on top of matte black plexi, held together with brass screws. This method of framing suits the images and their inner meaning.

I created subsequent larger images to be lit through only transparency, without gold. I found that without gold the globe could glow in a different way, giving off lucid, clear light. I floated these images between two transparent pieces of plexi because it is clean and simple, hiding nothing.

All the images were created and printed in my loft, first on silver gelatin paper and than on transparent materials that I find both reflective and deep.