ann(e): pencil and gouache

I suppose innocence is a way of protecting ourselves, a weak shelter for vulnerability.

Children and animal imagery are a way for me to approach empathy and otherness in my work. I make worlds inhabited by benighted bears, pink sparrows (joined literally at the hip), wolf girls, armies of poodles, and rows of children’s heads, wrapped in lace collars that hang from a wall and follow you with eyes that are at once sad and silly.

Memory and metaphor combine in my work. Photography is often the source of the heads, mined from old daguerreotypes, ambryotypes, and tintypes of children held in place for unnaturally long poses. A moment in time can appear to have a shape. Time can be something visible but constructed, moments layered like a series of transparencies. My sculpture is based on this model of time and my sculpture acts as a recreation of that unnatural stillness.

Some of the girl’s heads have medical anomalies, qualities that might make them freaks. But their forms and malformations remind us that we too are part of and susceptible to the natural world.

Upcoming Exhibitions:

"Feral Nature" August 25th- Sept. 27th 2006
http://ah.utdallas.edu/season0607/feralnature.htm

“Pretty Baby” Feb. 2007
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX