Department of Mental Hygiene (1934), clay, 2010

I am attracted to obscure histories. For this body of work, I conducted research at the California State Archives
in Sacramento, combing through historic documents and archival photographs. As a result, the parallel ideas of “inmates” and the “correctional facility” or “asylum” have emerged in the forms of oil and gouache portraits and the application of wet clay to the gallery wall. The portraits were of female inmates from San Quentin and the wall “paintings”, in which the clay dries, cracks, peels, and crumbles to the floor, were inspired by the Stockton Asylum, the state’s oldest facility for the insane, and San Quentin State Prison, the state’s oldest prison which housed female inmates from the mid 19th through the early 20th century.

11791, gouache on paper, 2009

Together, these works frame the question of how individuals are classified and placed within the penal system.They also exhibit my curiosity about what constitutes a criminal or an insane person, especially when that person is a woman. As I reflected upon these sordid layers of our cultural history, I wondered about the individual stories that have been erased by time, leaving only mug shots and stains on the asylum walls. Perhaps this is why I enjoy working with materials that impede my ability to “control” the outcome: diluted paint that pools, bleeds, and separates as it dries, creating the effect of staining or erosion; or wet clay on the wall that leaves as evidence only a trace of what was there before. Working in this way not only conjures mental parallels to the corrosive nature of time on material things – such as evidence – and on memory, but it also allows me to reflect upon how the “correctional institution” has a degenerating effect upon the “inmate”.

11791-A, gouache on paper, 2009