Four years ago, I began painting young women based on imagery found in popular culture, primarily fashion magazines. I was initially attracted to the small dramas depicted in these staged scenes and gradually saw them as metaphors for certain themes that are relevant to my life and my work, such as: girl as motif, loss, melancholy, pleasure, and nostalgic and romantic images of childhood and love. My work represents this imagery as filtered through my (feminine and maternal) point of view.
The themes of my current work are the sometimes awkward and self-aware consciousness of teenage girls: their struggle for self-possession and individuality; the dualities of teenage female consciousness, such as conformity and self-expression, self-revelation and concealment and the expressive and self-preservationist functions of fashion and other signifiers of identity. By locating the protagonists in their most private and personal spaces, and by combining behind-the-scenes and on-stage “performances” in the structure of my paintings, the work attempts to probe the transitory experience of girls’ changing psyches and bodies.