Works in Progress
My artistic process is guided by intuition rather than reason; dominated by emotion rather than logic. I often choose my next steps, next brushstrokes, based on the how the previous step taken has now altered the piece. I find this reactionary style of making to be freeing as the work is constantly shifting, always dynamic; a thousand versions of this one idea can exist. I’m never satisfied with a recreation of a vision, but rather what a meditation on that vision evolves into.
Currently…
The current piece I am working on is something of a physical piecing-together of my early childhood. Quilting, an art taught to me by my grandmother, carries universal connotations of domesticity, tradition, handmade, handworn, and deeply emotional ties. The content displayed and embroidered into the surface of this blanket is all derived from my past as well as the past of my immediate family members: primary school journal entries, childhood drawings, and photos from my Mom’s shiny red Nikon. The work is intended to be an investigation into childhood naïveté, familial roots, the immense magnitude of the self, and memory as a faculty of the soul; a dive into the question of how to reconcile this past version of yourself that you cannot recall, one who made memories that you cannot recall, into who you are today. I also seek to explore of the duality of familial relationships, childhood, and the premature loss of innocence and withering away of wonder that occurs along this path.
How can you long for something you cannot remember? How can have nostalgia to be this person again when they are, in truth, the one looking out your very eyes? It is thus the human condition to be unable to grasp all that we are– our minds too narrow to contain themselves.
Sanibel Betts 