The four Sirens paintings were produced for the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and were at the time the largest and most ambitious works I had produced.  The Sea Shanties  were made later that year as an answer to the Sirens  paintings, a kind of redemption song for the drowned sailors.   These  2009 works are based on Homer’s Odyssey  and on the traditional songs and stories of sailors.  The glitter swirls around dreamscapes of eroticism, drowning and rescue.

 

I work with glitter and glue on wooden panels.  Glitter is at the heart of my practice.  The principal theme of my work is the contradictions between the meanings that glitter carries on the one hand and the physical experience of glitter on the other.  Glitter carries connotations of childishness, girlishness, craft, kitsch.  But as a material I love it for its allure, its changeability, its flicker.  Glitter as a material drives my work; I ask myself: what are the stories that glitter tells?  Any my narratives come from there.  Often, there are elements of darkness and violence in these stories, a combination that is jarring and unexpected, which I hope becomes provocative and meaningful.