Artist's Statement - Institution of Identity - Collage Work

      This body of work is an exploration of the process of identity formation.  The process for creating the work is one which mirrors the struggle of fixing identity. With a single mark, a identity is both initiated and restricted.  Only by manipulation of the mark with erasure, or extension, or obfuscation, can the procreative moment be renamed.  Any additional mark changes the character of the first, in a way not unlike the way that experience changes identity.  That identity is fluid and mutable seems both obvious and suspect.   Identity is always partial and contextual, never "genetically bound."  Ideas about the self can change genetics. Genetics can effect our ideas about the self.  

      Through the medium of collage, I have sought to actively change and undermine the "identity" of the piece during its making.  In the process of creation,  the "subject" emerges from its environment and is then resubmerged.  This process is repeated over and over until a somewhat stable harmony is reached.  It is an arbitration between figure and ground, subject and world.   This marginally stable harmony is what I call "identity."  It is a temporary resolution of the conflict which motivated the making of the piece. The collage is never really fixed, nor finished, but is rather a document of a process of  "mark affecting brain and brain affecting mark."  The cohesion of experiential marks and unconscious process is the identity of the art, and a partial and mutable identity for the artist.

Susan M. White