Artist Statement for Savage Surrenders
September 2010
Flood Gallery, Asheville, NC

In the summer of 1984, in Memphis Tennessee, my grandmother
– a conservative Southern Baptist from Iuka, Mississippi– gave my cousin and I brown paper grocery sacks filled with Harlequin Presents romance novels to read. We were 10 years old. We gobbled them up, separately. My cousin moved to Florida for a few years because her parents got divorced, and we didn’t talk to anybody about the books
- not my grandmother, not each other. They were kind of like secrets.

A few years ago, I found a bunch of these books at a flea market in east Tennessee – 1970s and early 1980s Harlequin Presents. They were intimately familiar – the aged ivory white covers, the pastel colors of the authors’ names, the circular painted illustrations of passionate embrace, the red edges of the text block, the smell of the pages. I bought two – Rooted in Dishonor and The Long Surrender.

At the same time that I found these books, my grandmother was cleaning
out her house and she sent me her old bed sheets. One set was a stunning blue rose number with intertwining green vines and enormous flame-like blue flowers that I remember from her bed over in the house she lived in while we were growing up.

I became really interested in the two things – the novels and the bed sheets. There are so many points of symbolic overlap; domesticity, personal story, mass production, industry, women’s work, intimacy, sex, dirty laundry.

Over the past few years I’ve been collecting bedsheets and Harlequin Presents paperback romances and using the patterns and pages to think about what the books mean to me, and what I think they might mean in a larger, cultural sense. At this point, I’m still researching, still thinking. I’m interested in the function of the romance novel, the structure of stories, the history of printed domestic textiles, the process of repeat pattern design, the connection of pattern and memory and the implications of this particular mass-produced, but intimate, narrative voice.

While making the work for this exhibition, I’ve tried to stay as faithful as I can to the original structure and nature of the books and the sheets. It is not my intention for the paintings and papercuts to take a position as to whether Harlequin Romances are good or bad. I believe they are deceptively important and complex. For now, I just want to acknowledge them, focus a lens on them, look at them a little more closely.

The compositions of the paintings are dictated by the cover illustrations of the novels. The paintings are made using hand cut stencils made of wax paper, which are so delicate they can only be used once. I like the way that this process takes a print-based mark – which is typically mass-produced - and creates a necessarily unique, single painting. It echoes the mass production/distribution of the sheets and romance novels, while underscoring their ultimate, distilled effect on a single individual.

The paper cuts have been created by removing chapters from a particular Harlequin Presents paperback, stitching the pages together with gold thread (referencing magic, wish fulfillment, fairytales and women’s work) and then cutting a pattern based on a selected bed sheet pattern. I enjoy cutting the novels apart. The text remains readable, at least in parts, with some fragmentation and gaps.