Our lives are a canvas. Everything and every person we experience is a brushstroke. Some we add ourselves and others are splashed on from forces beyond our control.
Body Canvas
For years I have been fascinated with the idea of how our experiences shape and mold us. I believe that we create our lives but also that our lives then shape and mold us in return. While we can sometimes choose the colors often they are thrown at us without our power to do anything. Then we are left to reconcile the new paint on the canvas – do we paint over it or weave it into a new image.
These works cross into many other projects I have worked on and look at the impact of that work on myself. How deeply are these experiences embedded into who I am? The cloud imagery was another way to understand how our lives are influenced by the passage of time and how the experiences that flow past us are drawn into us and create who and what we are. These pieces led to directly to the We Are Clouds project. The pieces with the face projected onto my body came directly out of the Enemies Project. They were my way to examine the influence on myself of the women I had met in Kashmir who had lost their husbands, brothers or sons to the Indian Security forces. This project is not closed yet.
Additional Body Canvas Works from the Enemies Project
See more of these works here.