Without Irreverence (divas and acrobats), 2013-14
Glazed porcelain. Fouty-one figures @ 4”- 5” high.
In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the author’s alter ego, artist Lily Briscoe, says of her painting’s subject, “A mother and child may be reduced to a shadow without irreverence.” Woolf’s novel of familial loss and reconciliation inspired this installation of hand-altered porcelain slip-castings based on a mother and daughter pair of antique style cloth-body china dolls. Forty individually mounted figures strike poses based on feminist painter Nancy Spero’s iconic temple acrobats, sky goddesses, and divas. They spread out and come together across the gallery wall, at once bound by and set free from the consequences of their intimacy.