Goose Flesh reworks Regina José Galindo’s radical performance, in which a pregnant artist had herself tied to a bed, filtering it through my own experience of medical violence. The title names an extreme, involuntary somatic reaction - the body’s response to an encounter with the Lacanian Real that resists being grasped at all.

I’m interested in how the performative practices of 1960s women artists resurface inside contemporary painting. Right now I’m working through statements by Carolee Schneemann and Shigeko Kubota. Here, the painterly gesture becomes an extension of the body’s performance, pushing past normative control.

Plain Language: Goose Flesh - the body's reaction to the unbearable - carried from Galindo's performance onto canvas.

The triptych Painless (Hurts.Anymore.Not) is a painterly study of the inevitable collision between a person and an Other, whether it ends in destruction or in transformation. Here I return to the traumatic experience of motherhood, holding onto guilt, responsibility, anxiety, and the miraculous all at once. The stitching points to the surgical interventions that shaped both my life and my child’s. Piercing the canvas with a needle and pulling the thread through matters for its ritual, suggestive quality.

At the triptych’s center is a broken ultrasound image of an embryo which is my metaphor for any individual person. Across two other works I lay out two opposing narratives for this person: alienation on one side and compassion and connection that transcends every conflict on the other.

Plain language: One person collides with the Other - the world, its limits, its norms - and chooses between alienation and a connection that overcomes fear.

The triptych A Friend’s Gift is my reconstruction of the Prometheus myth. Every day the eagle Ethon flew in to peck at the liver of Prometheus, chained to his rock. Every day Prometheus submitted to the punishment. Then Heracles arrived and struck the eagle down. Or did he?

What interests me is the paradoxical trust a person places in rules set before they arrived, and whether there’s any way out of the game at all. I’m interested in the process of searching for meaning, and in the act of assigning meaning to whatever surrounds us. What if Heracles never came? Could Prometheus have defeated the eagle on his own? Who is Prometheus here, who is the eagle, who is Heracles? And whose gift is this, exactly?