ARTIST STATEMENT
My multimedia work focuses on compassion, forgiveness, and healing intergenerational trauma through the practice of storytelling. The intention is to move the viewer to imagine a more just, diverse, and inclusive world.
My work is an invitation. By design, the work is participatory; the transformation occurs within community.
The invitation is extended in different ways. It can be as direct as an invitation to participate in a video on forgiveness. It can be as simple as sitting and knitting with me during a performance. On the deepest level it is an invitation to look in the mirror at one’s own past; the source of fear, a feeling of being frozen or reactive.
In graduate school my mentor and teacher Germano Celant, the renowned Italian curator, critic and art historian, gave us a round mirror for our final examination. I looked deeply and found myself. I never looked back. The experience of standing before a mirror free of judgment or self-censure freed me both as a woman and as an artist. I knew that if I could extend that generosity to myself, I could create a safe environment for others to experience similar freedom. Perhaps this is why my presence allows my audience to feel safe and free to speak.
A still from Release Me, a durational performance in Compassion in Action at Alfred University, New York. Learn More.
Growing up I heard stories about escaping death, being hunted down, learned about how mygrandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and even a half sister were killed. I also heard stories about my mother’s heroism in saving hundreds of people’s lives as a Jewish partisan. I learned that people could be evil and commit unforgivable acts. The world they came from seemed black and white with splashes of blood red.
Because all of my adult family members were Holocaust survivors, social justice and “man’s inhumanity to man” were central themes in our home. Their stories are the bedrock of my works on healing and forgiveness.
My work is based in intersectional feminism and privileges the act of listening, being heard, and hearing. When we share stories we become a community, less alone. However, telling the most private of our stories requires fortitude and sometimes listening does too. Whether the community member is recording an audio story for a video, sitting inside an installation telling a stranger a secret, entering a performance space or solely witnessing the work, the viewer becomes a participant compelled to engage as their own memories are evoked.
A still from The Undoing: Forgiveness, a video performance funded by the Bruce Geller Grant 2021. Featured in Compassion in Action at Alfred University, New York. Watch the Video.
When we listen to the experiences of another, we often hear our own mirrored in their stories no matter how different they may appear. The “other” is transformed. What was once alien becomes familiar, no longer a threat. When we challenge our own narrative, even risk abandoning it altogether, we experience freedom. The work invites its viewers into meaningful dialogue and exchange, with individual and collective freedom as the promised reward.
My performance, video, sculpture, and installation work centers on the act of knitting. I have transformed knitting, a traditional woman’s craft, into a metaphor that speaks about binding, undoing, and connecting. Materials are used for their layers of meaning; at times using hemp for the plant’s ability to heal, renew, regenerate; other times waxed hemp twine to represent the stickiness of hurts that have been held onto or silk and cotton yarn to stand for the comfort of our self-imposed prisons.
In my hands knitting becomes a language of healing, unraveling intergenerational trauma, the importance of community and the power of forgiveness.
The Storyteller and Silent Listener in The Red Lotus, an installation in Compassion in Action at Alfred University, New York. Learn More.
This work is informed by the feminist tenet that “the personal is political,” which means that by looking at personal experiences collectively we depersonalize an experience and see it as a larger political issue.
I first encountered this tenet in the two years I spent working with Judy Chicago on The Dinner Party. Our weekly Thursday night potluck dinners with Chicago and the team of workers were filled with conversations, readings, and guest speakers such as Arlene Raven, Lucy Lippard, and Marija Gimbutas. These gatherings taught me that in healing personal and generational trauma, we are changing the world around us.
My recent exhibition Compassion in Action (2022) at Alfred University was composed of three interlocking pieces: The Undoing: Forgiveness, a video/performance utilizing anonymous stories of wrongs done and the desire to forgive from community members along with images of hands knitting waxed hemp twine and it then being unraveled; The Red Lotus, an installation of a knitted hemp yarn spiral with two chairs back to back for a storyteller and a silent listener; and Release Me, a five-day durational performance that was composed of me knitting in a rocking chair, an audio soundtrack that includes my stories, my parents stories, and natural sounds and music. Release Me is a roadmap to overcoming trauma.
The transformation occurs within community.