Artist Statement

 Video documentation of a performance, 2020, 7 minutes 33 seconds

“Smile, sweetie.”

As a woman who works as a sculpture technician, my competence and skills are constantly called into question on the basis of gender norms: “You look too young to be in charge here”; “I’m sorry, Sweetie, but are you qualified to fix this equipment?”. I want my body to be acknowledged and respected for its strength and what it is capable of doing. I want to smash the notions of that a woman has to dress or act a certain way - what she chooses to wear should not detract from her ability to do her job. 

The word sweetie was cast into candy as a medium because it is both sweet and delicious and desirable. But too much can be bad for you. I used a gross amount of candy, which is sickly sweet. The word sweetie is much the same way: it lands differently when your partner calls you sweetie as opposed to someone in your place of employment, especially when there are other power dynamics involved like race and gender.

Audre Lorde speaks as of anger as an important source of empowerment. It is my intention to use my anger to create work that allows us to ask the following question:

When we acknowledge the oppression of women in ways that are both systemic, deeply ingrained, and subconscious  

-       through the devaluing of women’s skills

-       through pejoratives

-       through undermining women’s expertise in male dominated fields 

 how do we imagine other possibilities otherwise – not in a theoretical way, but in a material world?