Statement for Artist Collective Spartanburg, South Carolina:
Covid has certainly made every decision more urgent and uncertain especially for those of us with the label “co-morbidity”. The isolation brought a lost autonomy that made working through these emotions in my studio a necessity for me. Some testimony to the darker aspects of physical and emotional barriers, confusion, and sadness of these days seemed important to commit to paper. Each work finished in this series, now at six, shows one contemplative aspect of this new reality that my normal life is not coming back and that my strength is daily tested by the domination of illness and the loss of my husband of 50 years. The stress of the “cures”, “monitoring”, and the safety separation of “masking” are indeed as emotionally and physically debilitating as the diseases. In a common historical way of expressing hope there is an obvious light source yet the barrier aspect of each is dominant. Using emotional and symbolic color seemed to be important for my stance taken in these drawings. Emergence from this pandemic seems still to be an unstable ground but in each drawing there are masks as the hint of human presence.