elizabeth / DANM210 / Project Proposal Rough Draft/Contextual Historical Statement

Contextual Statement

My work proceeds from discourses of feminism, science, philosophy, and poetic practice, and tries to resolve itself in curious collections, radical craft, and installation. I feel beholden to practical critiques of class and capitalism, to feminist anti-racism, the continued queering of heteronormative gender and sexuality, to anti-imperialism and the yearning incompleteness of hope. I’m interested in the continuing development of contemporary, interdisciplinary, transnational scholarship and art practice that allows me to articulate the experience of diaspora without complicated erasures and disenfranchising partialities.

I’d say that the philosophical aspects of my work around textiles as archives have focused upon a rethinking of space and spatiality within an inherently dynamic semitoic-materialism, the real and the symbolic imbricated or folded together as process in a way that subverts old fashioned notions of the pure, the fixed, the binary and bounded while simultaneously attempting or recovering re-imagined articulations of space and relations. Here I draw primarily upon the dynamic poetic science philosophies of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, the ethics, humor, and imagination of Donna Haraway, the expanded symbolic provided by Bracha Ettinger, and the materialist economic imperatives of Henri Lefebvre.

With respect to realizing my philosophies in artistic work, Ann Hamilton, Bruce Nauman, and The Gee's Bend Quilters Collective provide consistent inspiration– Ann Hamilton, for her profound attention to feminine objects and conceptual sculptures and installations considering text and erasure. Nauman’s early work emerging from his time at UC Davis demonstrates a mathematical and philosophical line of inquiry through minimalists concepts and technical explorations that I admire. In the Gee's Bend Quilter's Collective I find a liberating combination of skill and craft with soaring and courageous design.

I like to imagine that my work takes place in the absolute present, ephmeral in a way that brings the past and the future into unexpected focus. In particular, I am interested in following the mark of the hand as evidence of the body, its vulnerabilities and its possibilities along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. My weavings then become evidence and meditations upon difference where compelling investigations at varying scales may yield unexpected results.

All together, it’s an exciting mixed bag of artists and creative thinkers that I invite regularly into my art practice and I find great pleasure in allowing them to interrogate one another in a way that resonates with what is fascinating to me. At present these ideas come together in text and textile as technologies of collective memory.