This year I have been interested in exploring the themes of metamorphosis, renewal, transformation, and growth. The process is often painful, destructive, and beautiful, but also healing. I began researching by experimenting with oil pastels, a medium allowing for fluidity, bright colors, and density. I explored imagery of butterflies in various stages of chrysalis, fire, and the Phoenix. Through this process I also created images as meditation, no form, purely through instinct and color. Through this process the image of wings in movement became striking and I had the idea to make sculptural wings with color and movement. For me, the wings represented my freedom, growth, and the ability to change, taking pain and trauma and changing it into healing. I started with a maquette, the wing base made of bronze arrowheads that my grandfather had made, a profound influence on me as an artist with trauma of his own. I wanted to honor him as well as heal some of the intergenerational trauma that comes from putting a life on hold/broken due to external forces. The feathers of the wings were sculpted from recycled aluminum sheets hand cut and manipulated using fine tip needle nose pliers. The aluminum is colored using metalic stickers and vinyl sheets applied to the surface before manipulation. Applying paint or using colored paper was not going to give the right visual in the larger project, or allow for quick adaptation of colour changes, they also showed marks from the sculpting process that were not desirable. It is important to me to recycle, upcycle and use objects that have already had their carbon consumption to not create more CO2 than necessary. Each feather is hand cut from sheets of aluminum that have had vinyl applied to the surface. They are then sculpted by hand with one pair of fine tip needle nose pliers in one hand holding while the other hand/pliers creates the looks of feathered lines. Multiple colors have been carefully chosen and positioned together. Life sized wings will be built to be worn by me in a performance, I will be wearing a dress that I had painted as a self-portrait, and I will be incorporating a bronze spearhead that my grandfather made. Honoring our defiance against trauma, trying to take away our ability to create and see the beauty in this world. Performance has come naturally to me to embody a different persona, a way of painting emotion through motion.
