Artist’s Statement

Losing Sleep, a series of digitally generated images, continues my exploration of the neglect and abuse of children in our culture, and the transgenerational nature of this phenomenon. Our wounded and scarred children, often the product of damaged and wounded parents, become our damaged and wounded adults. The wounded self is passed from one generation to the next in a seemingly endless cycle of dysfunction and identity distortion. Our dysfunctional homes become our dysfunctional schools become our dysfunctional churches become our dysfunctional governments become our dysfunctional nations, and the cycle repeats itself.

In the debate over nature versus nurture, I embrace elements of both in considering the formation of self-definition that cannot be reduced simply to a cultural construct. While I assert that nature does assign certain fundamental attributes through biological or genetic codes, nurture has the potential to either support or subvert those attributes. In examining the powerful role of those responsible for the welfare of our most fragile and vulnerable resource, it becomes apparent that a learned legacy of ignorance, neglect and abuse continues to thrive even while we turn away in denial or disbelief.

Many of the works from Losing Sleep can be described as vague narratives, created using found and appropriated images, personal photographs, and digital drawings. Rather than defining specifics of interaction, they allude to transitional moments of passive neglect or active abuse. The images are suspended in handmade sheets of acrylic medium using lazertran transfer technology. The use of transparent and translucent surfaces as the support structure for these digitally generated images has multiple metaphorical references. The surfaces are, to varying degrees, skin-like in texture and/or color. They stretch, sag and distort under their burden or weight. They are constructed through a process of building layer upon layer, referring to the temporal layering of psychological, emotional, and physical development and transformation. The most transparent surfaces allow the viewer to see whatever might lie behind the suspended imagery, merging different realities into a potentially incongruent visual experience. As light passes through the "skins" when installed, images and textures suspended there cast a delicate and distorted shadow on nearby walls or other surfaces. Image clarity and focus is compromised, paralleling the potential breakdown of character or quality inherent in nearly any process of replication or reproduction (including childbirth) that yields multiple generations.