This body of work arose out of my MFA thesis, Possibilities of Transforming the Paradigm, and my clarity that to be an artist I must first be a citizen of this deeply troubled world and a lover of its beauty and uncertainty. Foundational was the rejection of the Cartesian paradigm; the necessity of paradox; the embrace of the trinity of known, unknown, and unknowable; and the centrality of the inner pathway to outer change. The coherence of my formal language and use of material evolved to hold this content.
In these pieces, I explored paradigm transformation through specific events of that time: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the quest to classify rape as a war crime in the aftermath of the Bosnia Hercegovina War and its hideous rape camps; the survivors' testimonies and the silenced voices of the millions of survivors in our midst; the juxtaposition of the Albanian refugees driven from Kosovo with the loss of migratory bird habitats.
In 1997, I saw the film Calling the Ghosts: A Story About Rape, War and Women, a documentary about building the ultimately successful case before The Hague court to classify rape as a war crime. If I Speak... tackles the complexities of testifying: of re-inhabiting the wound that the telling of one's story of violation and survival requires. As importantly, it asks "If I speak who is listening?". In the work, the testimony of Bosnian rape camp survivors is printed on both sides of the 7 suspended ceramic folios. Printed in reverse on the verso, the excerpts are readable in the reflections in the wall mounted mirror alongside marks of violence that the thin clay bears. Simultaneously, the viewer sees their own face reflected in the mirror as they become part of the story unfolding in real time. If I Speak... dismantles separations we make and interrogates the moveable boundaries between witness, survivor, and perpetrator, between observed and observer, between there and here, then and now.
