Winged Women

Winged Women is a personal mythology composed in metaphors of femininity and flight, staged on an imagined landscape, the features of which have been drawn from a lifetime of photography. Variations on a recurring protagonist, the winged female nude, describe personal undulations between the binaries of creativity and fear, power and limitation. Beginning with the exuberant, contemplative and passionate gestures of the female dancer, each composition’s narrative evolves from the masterful expression of emotion through form. Wings are added digitally, photographed from both living and stuffed birds. Landscapes are chosen from the artist’s lifetime of travel and include additional elements shot specifically for the composition. These become theatrical stages, active and inhospitable, but suggestive of environmental origins, upon which the winged dancers perform. The resultant ballet reflects an autobiography lived and felt, and the pursuit of an ideal across a landscape i! n tumult. Over 17 years, the artist’s methodology has evolved as a marriage of classic and contemporary techniques. The final files combine scanned 2 ¼ film and digital images, most output to a black and white negative and printed in a conventional darkroom as editions of gelatin silver prints of varying scale, while the primary pieces are printed digitally in life size.