WMV4 Painting

As someone who has always struggled to identify with one place and a fixed belonging, I make drawings and paintings that make use of maps and mapping symbols as well as personal and historical iconography in an effort to reconcile personal and social identity investigations. My most recent work addresses my highly conflicted emotions regarding the South. Having moved back to the South, after more than a decade away, as one half of a mixed race couple and mother to a young daughter, my sensitivity to racism is much more intense and intrinsic. In many ways, this part of the United States has moved far from its ugly, racist past. Yet not in all ways and certainly not completely. Maps, mapping symbols, confederate iconography, magnolias and red Georgia clay are some of the elements featured in the abstract landscapes that vacillate between disillusionment and optimism. Among the layered and entangled mesh of personal and historical iconography and memories, I attempt to navigate out of the dark history that, especially now, wants so desperately to drag us back. And sometimes, I am successful.