Fragments

When I began making my fragments in the 1970s, I called myself the ‘mother of the fragment.  My first exhibition was in 1967 in Fort Worth, Texas. It was called Fragments: Rated X and held at MJS Gallery.  I exhibited parts of the body with a directness that people weren’t accustomed to seeing, especially from a woman artist. That reaction fascinated me. Why was the body acceptable in certain forms, and from men,  and unacceptable in others? Who decided what could be shown, and who had the right to show it? 

I was living through a time when women were questioning the roles assigned to us. We were expected to behave a certain way, look a certain way, marry, have children, and often place our own ambitions further down the list. I knew those expectations well. At the same time, I was trying to establish myself as a serious artist in a world still largely controlled by men. The fragments became a way for me to claim the body rather than simply allow it to be looked at. I isolated breasts, mouths, torsos, buttocks, hands, and other parts of the figure, making each one the entire sculpture. I life cast the people who worked for me. 

There was no apology, no attempt to make them more acceptable. By removing the rest of the body, I made the fragment impossible to ignore. There was sexuality in the work, certainly, and I wasn’t afraid of it. Sexuality is part of being human. But the work was also about vulnerability, desire, loneliness, power, exposure, and the strange experience of living inside a body while knowing that other people are looking at it and judging it. I discovered that a fragment could sometimes carry more power than a complete figure. Remove the face, and you remove the easy explanation of who that person is.