These images represent two separate but related performances. The photograph on the left represents my practice of merging body and landscape in the woods of Rabun County, Georgia. My intention in this practice is to blur the boundaries between nature and self in order to explore the quiet unfolding relationship between the body, earth and [...]
There are two elements to Initiation – the drawing/painting and the handmade object. In both I weave together parts of myself with parts of an animal. The idea of seams is important in my work. My intent is to create an image for the viewer to wonder over. For example, is [...]
Though my work as a whole bridges mediums from video to miniature sculpture, recently, I have been most invested in making drawings.
Drawing, I feel, provides an immediacy and intimacy necessary to these works. Drawing was our (human beings’) earliest means to communicate ideas, tens of thousands of years before the advent of written language, seen [...]
Please Click Here to Watch Select Excerpts from “The Amber Doll Project” (1min)
In 2007, I commissioned the production of a life-like sex doll, a RealDoll, made of a posable PVC skeleton and silicone flesh, in my exact likeness. My doll, Amber Doll, began as a Styrofoam print-out of a digital scan of my head. Her [...]
Please Click Here to Watch Select Excerpts from “The Feminism? Project” (1min)
Starting with sorority sisters and ending with her own mother, Amber Hawk Swanson scripts her ten videos from “The Feminism? Project” from edited interviews with a variety of women. Their original responses to the topic of feminism range from naïve surprise to composed discourse, [...]
Axis Mundi Remote Performance Video Clip
Axis Mundi is my remote performance that took place in January at Jokursalon, a glacier lagoon near Vatnajökull glacier in southeast Iceland. My only audience for the piece (besides the cameraperson) was several swimming seals, as I am interested in performances in remote locations with no audience except for the [...]
Click here for brief excerpt
The texts used in Renetta Sitoy’s animated video The Truth about Boys and Girls were collected by typing the following queries into Google: “girls like to,” “boys like to,” and “boys and girls like.” While the “girls like to” search mostly generated negative responses relating to issues of self-esteem and sexual [...]
My process involves traveling to remote woods in North Georgia and opening myself to connecting to place; to the plants, animals, soil, rocks and leaves. I open my senses to receive the distinct fecund scents, the rush of wind through the cells in my skin, the call of birds and tremble of wings, the chorus of leaves and the bare earth under my feet. I set the intention of feeling and sensing the silent conversation between things and insert my own body and being into the dialogue. I can feel the rhythms and cycles of nature and how my body innately understands and matches its own breathing to the breath of the landscape. What can feel like thick impenetrable boundaries between inner-self and outer world begin to soften as self and environment bleed into one another. My body knows and remembers the earth. I employ different techniques to facilitate the connection: I press my chest against the soil to feel the heartbeat of the earth; paste leaves and sticks on my skin to feel the flesh of the world; and sometimes use pigment applied to my own body to mimic the bark of a tree. I am interested in the unfolding relationship between self and nature.
When I return to my urban-based studio, I attempt to recreate my experience in the woods. I use man-made materials such as felt tip markers, stickers, metallic paint, processed wood and neon color, as well as organic materials such as collected sticks, sand, soil, grass, bark and organic inks to explore the distance between and intersection of manufactured landscape and organic environments. At times, I reinsert my own body in the piece to further highlight the distance between urban and remote spaces. Through a process of deep surrender I use my body and energy to reengage the sense of connection I felt while in the organic world within an artificial environment.
‘AWICHA YARTIRI’ is a proposal for an on-site installation which highlights the parallels of Bolivian and Korean culture, which still respects indigenous traditions in a contemporary climate.
‘AWICHA YARTIRI’ layers images, colors and objects derived from my personal mythology and genetic memory against architectural models and objects appropriated from traditional Korean Mudang (shaman) Gut (ritual) “Spirit [...]