Simone de Beauvoir’s statement, “The Body is not a thing, but a situation,” best describes my work, both as a medical practitioner and an artist.

 

As a young painter in the early 1970’s, I became deeply involved in the anti-war, feminist, and abortion rights movements. I began to find the practice of making art very confusing in the midst of such political upheaval. It didn’t help that the art world was screaming that painting was dead. 

 

It was during that time that I began to consider medicine & health care as my political work. I was motivated by a deep desire to change the world by helping women to establish autonomy and agency over their own bodies, sexuality and reproduction.

 

I left art school and went to medical school, becoming a health provider in women’s sexual and reproductive healthcare for the next 40 plus years.

 

Even as I immersed myself as a clinician and activist in women’s health, I continued to be pulled back to art making as an essential life practice. 

 

My medical practice has allowed me direct access to matters of the flesh, the interior organs, bleeding, sex, birth, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, disease, death. All of these resist the idea of the body as a singular static object. These living situations of the body are central to my vocabulary in my work as an artist.

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THERE WILL BE BLOOD & BLOOD GLOVES is a series of sculptures, paintings & collages in response to my despair and rage at the 2021 Dobbs Decision by the Supreme Court that dismantled abortion rights guaranteed by Roe V. Wade– The Supreme Court decision I had marched for back in 1971. This recent series is a direct response to the blood and hemorrhaging shed by so many women and pregnant people trying to access health care for their own bodies.

  

My interest in the experience of the body has been deeply and intimately ingrained in me as  both a clinician in women’s health and an artist. I have now come full circle in my understanding that art, like medicine, requires empathy and wonder – the antecedents to creativity and the imagination. 

 

To look, to look away 

To look back, to look 

Again and back again 

Understanding is action  

Action is political

Art is the making

 

Life is the art of living on the edge of contradiction. ​​

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