Perfect!
Women tend to strive for perfection but that's an unreachable goal. Imperfection is reality. According to journalist Jessica Hagy, perfection leaves no room for priorities, no space for humanness, no time for joy. Striving for it leads to breakdowns, burning out, eating disorders and self-hatred. The pursuit of perfection is a Sisyphean task. It is unrewarding, frustrating, and worst of all: entirely subjective. Perfection looks different and means different things to everyone. American author Anna Quindlen calls it the perfection trap and suggests giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.
Information Overload
This artwork was created in the style of the early 20th century artistic movement 'Futurism' emphasizing the dynamism, speed, energy and power of the machine in combination with the vitality, change and restlessness of modern life. Several different techniques were used to express speed and motion, including the use of lines of force. I have set the focus on New Media and Digital Technology which make our everyday's life spin overwhelmingly faster and faster. Information overload, also called 'infoxication', occurs when our daily input exceeds our procession capacity and is likely to reduce the quality of our decisions.
Hope
In my series of portraits of South African women and girls, different generations are pictured. What unites them, is the recurring desire for a better life, fed by similar hopes. Hope for the end of the remnants of apartheid and political corruption, hope for less violence, hope for paid work, hope for better education, hope for better living conditions. What remains after years of political and social change are patriarchal stuctures within families, physical abuse, a high unemployment rate, a very high crime rate, social inequality, serious problems in the education system, lack of opportunities, racism and poverty. Shattered dreams are inevitable, but the hope for change for future generations remain. Women stay the pillars of their families and demonstrate strength and confidence. The use of salt in my body of work serves as a symbol for recurring problems under similar conditions. Just as salt has had an enormous influence on the development of history worldwide in political, religious, economic and cultural terms, the coarse salt, used in a 3D layer, illustrates in this context external circumstances that have shaped the country and its people. All my portraits of this series are rather shadowy, but the age is recognizable, representing the respective age group. The intentional similarity in the tonality and perceived texture convey the omnipresence of the mentioned socio-political issues across generations.
