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BOOK PAINTINGS

When I was a young girl I loved looking at paintings (I still do!) but growing up in the 1950's and 60's I didn't have a feminist perspective on what I saw in museums, galleries and books. And later, at art school, I was taught that the subject matter of an art-work is incidental, that a painting's significance is determined by its formal excellence not its 'story'.

But that's not the whole truth. We've learned that the stories paintings tell often function, like advertising, at a subliminal level.

The 'book paintings' focus on images from my library of art books, the images that 'filled me up' as a young person, the images that subtly informed my sense of self both as a woman and as an artist. By juxtaposing and overlapping these images from the covers of books and further altering them through the distortions of refracting and reflecting glass vases, I created a series of personal stories about gender, motherhood, and longing.