An exercise in taking up space, embracing authenticity, and refusing to play small.

There is something strange about becoming sixty.
You reach an age when the world begins to look through you. Women become less visible. Less interesting. Less desirable. We are expected to quietly move toward the edges—to make room, to become background.
But what if becoming invisible to the world creates an opportunity to finally become visible to yourself?

I’s, My’s & Me’s is a body of work about that contradiction.

My work questions identity and value through distorted beliefs, fragmentation, collage, and self-portraiture. This new body of work is larger, more physically assertive, and more vulnerable than anything I have made before. The scale is intentional. After a lifetime of learning how to make myself smaller, I wanted to make something I could not hide behind.

For much of my life, I was a supporting character in the lives of others.  I became who and whatever I needed to be. I learned to anticipate, accommodate, please, and adapt. These were survival skills, and for a long time I mistook them for personality.

It wasn't until my divorce in 2016 that I seriously considered a question that seemed almost embarrassingly simple:

What do I want?

Years later, I have a better answer to that question.

Now I am asking something harder:

Who do I want to be?

Who am I when the people, roles  and expectations that once defined me no longer do? Who might I become if nothing is preventing me from becoming her except myself?

The title of this exhibition comes from a phrase my mother used: having the “I’s, My’s and Me’s.” It was something you never wanted to be accused of. The phrase carried the implication of selfishness, vanity, and an inappropriate desire for attention.

I learned early that having needs was dangerous. Wanting something for myself was selfish. Taking up too much space was threatening.

Especially to my mother.

I was never looking for the kind of attention she needed. I was threatening the kind of attention she needed.

There is a difference.

That distinction has taken me most of a lifetime to understand.

So now, at sixty, I find myself making work about myself—and hearing those old voices rise up:

Self-centered. Conceited. Who do you think you are? Stop looking for attention.

But perhaps this is not about attention at all.

Perhaps it is about recognition.

About looking directly at the person who has spent decades looking outward and asking, Who are you when no one else gets to answer for you?

Turning sixty has brought an unexpected kind of clarity. The people, roles, and expectations that once seemed permanent have shifted or disappeared. There is less time to spend being who I am supposed to be—and, increasingly, less interest in doing so.

At an age when the culture tells women they are becoming invisible, I am becoming more visible to myself.

These works are an act of dismantling and rebuilding. Layers are obscured, torn apart, reassembled, and exposed. Images fragment. Familiar things become strange. The self is not presented as fixed, but as something continually constructed and reconstructed.

Influenced by Francesca Woodman’s exploration of presence, absence, identity, and the female body, and by the Starn Twins’ fractured photographic constructions, where individual pieces accumulate into something larger, chaotic, interconnected, and whole. Their work gave me permission to think about the photograph—and the self—not as something fixed, but as something that can be dismantled and rebuilt.

These works are an act of dismantling.

They are also an act of refusal.

I refuse to diminish myself into the background.

I refuse to apologize for having needs, desires, opinions, contradictions, ambition, anger, joy, or a story worth telling.

I refuse to confuse being needed with being known.

And I am beginning to understand that taking up space is not the same thing as taking space away from someone else.

I’s, My’s & Me’s is not a declaration that I have figured out who I am.

It is the evidence of me finally asking.

At sixty, perhaps I am not disappearing.

Perhaps I am finally arriving.