ARTIST STATEMENT
Vanessa Woods
Vestiges (2017–), is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, sculpture, and 16mm films to interrogate the malleability of motherhood and its profound connections to boundaries and mortality. In the project, I investigate the tensions of motherhood while acknowledging its paradoxes. I show a body turned inside out and remade through my children’s bodies. I explore the extraordinary fact that the maternal body and mind are physically and biologically remade through the process of becoming a mother. I also examine the conflicts that live within maternal experience; the need to simultaneously hold on and let go of my children, to extend my body to them and reclaim it for myself, and the physical experience of being both embodied and disembodied.
The work in Vestiges is highly iterative, it shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed, rebuilt, and adapting. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble. Like kintsugi, fracture is the very thing that allows for remaking. Throughout the work, physical boundaries are created and fractured to speak to the blurred margins between my children’s bodies and my own. Additionally, cast objects are used as symbols. These flat forms, made from poured hardened plaster, are photographed with bodies and used as puzzle pieces—white biomorphic shapes absent of visual information that cast dark shadows. These plaster forms, used in combination with casts of my, and my children’s hands, confuse the viewer's experience of what is real and what is manufactured. The work often generates spaces of vertigo, confusion, ambivalence, and reorientation, where shadows are removed from their anchors and symbols must find new signifiers.
In the finished works, photography, and the body function as timekeepers in tandem. Within each piece, time is both compressed and expanded. In a singular collage, the viewer might see photographic fragments of my children’s hands from different moments in time, swaths of unblemished young skin, and a cast sliver of my aging hand. The space within the image becomes one where bodies are recorded, contained, and transmitted across generations.
The range of visual strategies and the hybrid approach to image-making in Vestiges emphasizes the idea of things being made and remade. It suggests that motherhood contains multitudes. Mothers move in tandem with their children, adapting to their evolving needs as they change and grow. At each stage of motherhood, the role of the maternal body, the mind, and the mother adapt. Vestiges illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience and pluralizes it, showcasing how maternal perspective can reshape current discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Vanessa Woods
Vanessa Woods' collages utilize disparate associations to re-imagine and re-contextualize contemporary and historical narratives. The material for her collages comes from a broad range of sources including art history books, photo books, vintage/contemporary magazines, found paper ephemera, and her own photographs. In each piece that she creates, the original image is decontextualized through the act of cutting and it’s meaning re-contextualized through new associations. In her current body of work, titled Vestiges, Woods uses the birth of her children as the genesis for an expansive project exploring the maternal body and the conditions of motherhood.
Website: vanessawoods.com
Instagram: vanessa_woods_studio
