While reading Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing I was deeply thinking about the idea of art as a screen to divert the evil eye: the idea of the artist dropping an image or object in order to “attract” the other away. To divert my sense of haunting in the recollection of the image. Answering “why do I do this?” These images are almost embedded in me, going over and over memories by recalling them has a tempering effect on them. And it seems to me that the subjects I explore are all portraits: of psychological states, question, doubts, little details of recollections, thoughts and little obsessions. 

It didn’t actually occur to me before how essential layering in my image making is. I do it unconsciously even in my handwriting, going over and over letters with pencil, pens of different colors and thickness until they are almost illegible. The medium is a support, a vehicle for layering. Last winter I was experiencing frustration because of the repetition of technique; the process being not my ultimate goal.

I was also trying to find other ways to harvest responses and I wanted to be more present, refer to my own images and memories without “outsourcing the seed of an image”. 

In Erased, however, the act of recollection was more violent, more like a mutilation or an undoing. With this work (and the ones I made after that) I started to explore another way to achieve layering and a screen effect. I applied thick layers of semi-transparent gesso (by mixing white and transparent gesso or gesso with pure pigments/ acrylic) in between pastel layers. In Erased I was thinking about the idea of being stripped of enjoying pleasure for the sake of it, the need to be working instead of playing, and the consequent self-undoing and self-mutilation that led to Haircut of the braid (below). Hair bleed after that, a symbol of mutilation as you never feel worthy or appreciated, but a symbol of self-renewal as well. Some cultures believe that hair keeps your emotions and when you cut it, you let them go. 

Installation view below emerged as a series of strange connections. Like in the non-sequential territory of dreams, objects and images exist in association with each other. Isn’t it most challenging to try and tell a dream to someone? Things that at the moment appeared to flow organically from one scene to the next are somehow fragmented when you try to make some logic out of it. The flow from an image to the next is free. 

During my auto-hypnosis practice and as a recurrent thought I started to see blood a lot, as the most explicit symbol of violence I see in nature, in human nature, but also as a very essence of vitality and femininity . Blood as the sign of fertility, reproduction and child birth even.