My Mother’s Garden
This work is a palimpsest, created on the torn out pages from a book that I bought, second hand, at a flea- market on the streets of Paris. The subject of the book is the health of women. It was published the year that my mother gave birth to me. The subject of the book, that it was found second-hand, as well as the year of publication were significant triggers as I started the work for My Mother’s Garden., All these facts worked themselves into a mental edifice of the way we view women, mothers, health and the idea of the feminine, especially where these ideas ensnarl and entangle themselves with ideas about nature and the garden. Untangling the many knots of associations, a central subject of the work became our contemporary relationship with Gaia. My Mother’s Garden grew in dimensions so that I found myself making work that is about our relationship to the feminine principle in particular and to the whole of nature in general. Nature becomes My Mother’s Garden. My mother is Mother Earth, Pacha Mama. Artemis. She has many names and guises from different cultures. I see how she is celebrated and debased, forgotten and remembered, neglected and embellished.
The work became a sort of elegy, a visual poem that reflects upon the currently unfolding relationship between humankind and nature. At the heart of my work is the growing understanding that the negative side of this relationship is deeply troubled, exploitative, unrealistic, short-sighted and careless.; And that it will continue to be troubled as long as we see ourselves as separate from nature. Some of the images move into a place where the oneness of human consciousness and nature consciousness is celebrated and seen as a redemptive doorway.
