Art from my college years at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The object on the tray is the skull of one of my family pets.
Title: Tank Materials: Bone, tar, steel tray, gold leaf Date: 1990
The pet was a large tortoise named Tank who roamed free-range in my house in the mid 1970’s when I was growing up. A few years after he died, I covertly dug up his bones and hid them in a secret container on a rudimentary shrine in my bedroom. His remains were the first I ever kept. Over the years that followed, I saved a handful more from other pets and the esoteric shrines became more elaborate. Later, while in college, I began incorporating their cherished remains into memorial artworks. Over the years a lot of articles about my art have mentioned the above practice. However, in an attempt to sensationalize my work, none of them ever mentioned what sort of animals the pets were or specifically what I created with them. Writers intentionally left that up to the imagination of readers in order to conjure up images of me digging up cats and dogs under the light of a full moon. To this day some writers are still eager to capitalize upon the “dug-up-her-dead-pets-and-made-art-with-their-bodies” angle. You would think by now people would have grown bored of this tagline. Sadly, people tend to be narrow-minded so anything outside of Western social norms remains an eccentricity to them. After working tirelessly for 3 decades to legitimatize my belief system and my choice of art materials I still receive invitations from galleries asking me to participate in their “Halloween exhibitions” and get approached by death metal bands and horror book authors for cover art. To avoid fostering further typecasting, I politely decline. After 30 years of working with animal remains, I still feel somewhat disheartened when people interpret my work as morbid. Unless you are an artist yourself, you have no idea how intensely personal a piece of art can be to its creator. And unless you have worked with the body of an animal, you don’t know how much more intimate the connection to the work is. My work is a celebration of life, not a spectacle of death. This isn’t for shock value. My art is my religion
