The Real Cages
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The Bird Cages Series 4
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The Bird Cages Series 2
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The Bird Cages Series 1
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The Bird Cages Series 3
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Literary Heroines
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About The Bird Cages
In The Bird Cages, a common literary metaphor that has communicated a negative and fixed gender role for women since the early Renaissance is updated to represent the obstacles and trappings of the modern feminine experience. A graceful heroine appears in a variety of yoga poses, exercising a strong sense of health and well-being. Striving for balance and stillness, she is bombarded with commitments, expectations, and random thoughts. Clippings from newspapers, magazines, and books line her cage and represent messages that have influenced women for nearly a hundred years. The heroine of this series is educated, focused, cultured, strong-willed, and accomplished domestically and professionally. Certainly, she is not unaware of her situation in the bird cage.
The first impression of each painting offers balanced, perhaps benign, qualities. The emotional message of the series exists within the layers of visual details that reference established stereotypes and gender inequalities. Embroidery thread, collage, and cut paper silhouetting -- all devalued mediums associated with female artists -- advance the theme of this series. Thematically, the hook of the cage is the most powerful image within the body of work. As a question mark it demands an answer, or at least forces the question: in terms of ideas about women's nature and role in society, how much remains unchanged? With the courage to question, we cut the wires of our invisible, timeless cages and remain on a path toward defining, achieving, and maintaining balance.
It is almost overwhelming to consider how much remains unchanged since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of ideas about the nature of women and our role in society. Today, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, women are faced with more possibilities than ever before, but also more mixed and damaging messages. The contemporary media offers a wide array of sexually liberated female role models; most are so emotionally unbalanced that they are hardly more evolved than a nineteenth century fiction character. Within The Bird Cages body of work, I explore this theme, revisit the questions raised by early twentieth century female American author Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries, and encourage a continued dialogue.