Taboo

The detritus of my children’s active lives provided much of the source material for my work as they were growing up.  The images in the Taboo series came from a book that my daughter did when she was 5 or 6.  Her book begins with her stick-figure portrait declaring “I set out to cut off wenys and penises.” When I first discovered the book years earlier, my initial maternal response was queasy at best; my artistic response was one of fascination. It took awhile for the images to enter a less vulnerable space within our lives, so that they could be transformed into this more public exploration of a child’s burgeoning sexuality.  My daughter was 13 when I made this work and she agreed to let me to use the images from her book. She did not remember making the book and thought it was indeed kind of weird.