If I is a monster,
so be it
Norberg Hall, 2025
The title for the exhibition, If I is a monster, so be it, is a phrase taken from Lauren Elkins’s book “Art Monsters, Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art.” Elkin likens art-making by women as feminist points of resistance. To be a monster is to take up space, to be unruly, to disrupt, to be messy. In the book, she talks of dealing with pain and how, through art-making, we find ways of understanding, visualizing, writing, or formalizing that experience. Simply put: the body as language. She says, “To be in a body is to live with failure, to acknowledge eventual decay; to tell the truth of one’s experiences
within that body has to involve making room for failure, and decay, in one’s practice.” Herein lies the monster.
The abstracted figure or human form is central to all my work. Abstracted because we are rarely whole or singular. Abstracted, divergent, fractured and reconstructed seem more accurate to represent the human condition and ever-changing emotional or psychological space. The sum of parts makes up the whole, multifaceted and complex. This
concept is also represented through the manipulation of materials and their properties. “...[A]bstraction becomes a means to craft the shape or abilities of new bodies... Whether by evoking nature, escaping into fantasy, or by using their own bodies to model new possibilities, ...artists employ self-metamorphosis as an answer to the male-dominated
constructions governing identity.” (Alyce Mahon, “The Witch’s Cradle,” The Milk of Dreams, 2022). [RA, 2025
Images courtesy Resolve Photo and LF Documentation.