New Ground Covered

After spending hours theorizing about the implications of my photography, I realized it was 3:30 a.m. Plopping myself into bed it was then that it hit me. A great number of the artists (of whom I’ve exhumed the most self awareness) are all...gay. All forthright prominent fixtures; educators helping me to verbalize and activate my art. How does art, sexual orientation and feminism inform me?

“As a [wo]man develops, the circle of these experiences caused by different beings and objects, grows even wider. They acquire an inner meaning and eventually a spiritual harmony. It is the same with colour, which makes only a momentary and superficial impression on a soul but slightly developed in sensitiveness. But even this superficial impression varies in quality…But to a more sensitive soul the effect of colours is deeper and intensely moving…They produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step toward this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance...In highly sensitive people, the way to the soul is so direct and the soul so impressionable, that any impression of taste communicates itself immediately to the soul, and thence to the other organs of sense (in this case, the eyes). This would imply an echo or reverberation, such as occurs sometimes in musical instruments which, without being touched, sound in harmony with some other instrument struck at the moment.”[1]

21. Dancing Dreads

I am being played by all that I encounter. Vibrating in harmony while hanging on to the scaffolding of feminism. Close perimeters. So close I feel the electricity of it; being charged, recharged and re-commissioned. Until recently, the lack of art driven by the hand and mind of a woman, has never particularly been a point of interest. Now, as I seek a path to voice my life...my art, I sense it tall above all others. At the forefront. I’ll play amongst these women whose strength of ethics, sense of equality and character (all immutably feminine and artistically embodied), continue to inform me. Raising me as their own. The value I find in this association is found simply in the association, the bond of this norm...the everydayness and complexities, of being human...and female.

"Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes — love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself - and render them fully human. It may also, although our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and rich as those others - should we call it joy'?[2]

22. Going Her Way

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[1] Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by Kandinsky, W. (1977), Dover Publicatons, Inc., Mineola, NY.

^[2] Andrea Dworkin (1946-), American feminist critic, "Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia," in a speech, April 16, 1974, at Smith College, Northampton, Mass; published in Our Blood, chapter 1, 1976.