Started in 2003 while I was still at YCP, I didn’t get the impetus to finish this piece until my first year of grad school in 2007. I’m not sure why it languished in my studio for a few years. Sometimes the Muse is off wandering in the desert (I like to think she was at a jazz festival in Palm Springs).
This was the last painting in the “Contested Bodies” series. With these, I’d revealed plenty about my feelings on motherhood, pregnancy, and women’s roles and wanted to move on to figure out how to understand the binary thinking that caused all of this hardship for the female of the human species. The question was, how to get in between the binary and “break” it? I was still months and years away from figuring it out in that first year at MICA.
So, the mushrooms were painted in. And then colleagues and mentors gave me their opinions and they got painted out. Then I regretted being so easily persuaded and painted them back in. What I like about them is that they are reminiscently phallic. They can make one squirm— perhaps it’s a taboo to look at them. They’re really just mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of a larger organism under the surface which breaks down nutrient-rich environments.
I think it’s with this piece that I began to formulate the idea of individuals working in a group to achieve the group’s ends. In earlier posts in this archive, I wrote about multiples of individuals to comprise one entity. Individuals in a hive acting as one could create a complete society that would affect the ecology of an entire region. To me, it is a useful analogy for the kind of sweeping change that could happen if all women decided to work together as one for common goals.
A technical note: with this piece I’d discovered sfumato. It’s an Italian word which means “smoke”. In traditional oil painting it’s the strategy of not painting hard edges but obscuring them. I used sfumato around the face to challenge myself and broaden my painting skills. Occasionally, I find a use for it even in my currently design-heavy work.
Also: this piece is available for purchase here.
I’d love to read your comments and questions. :)