I make paintings of Barbie dolls. My medium of choice is egg tempera because it emphasizes the presence of the painter and associates my work with icon painting. Egg tempera was often used to paint Christian icons, images of people worthy of reverence. The early years of icon painting were turbulent due to worry about a conflict between principles and practice: to display reverence toward the person’s image was deemed as equivalent to the worship of a false god; it was feared that the image itself was being revered and not the person represented by the painting. I see a parallel with American society’s reception of the Barbie doll.

In my work, I examine ideas of bodies, the female/the feminine, and the uncanny. Bodies can be unpredictable, uncontrollable, and misunderstood. The female body finds itself as the exemplar of a misbehaving body: women menstruate; they give birth to other human beings; and they nourish those lives with their bodies. These processes do not occur on a set schedule in spite of the extant technologies that can enable this possibility. The concept of the uncanny also motivates my work. Sigmund Freud described the uncanny as a type of frightening that occurs when something which is familiar–but long repressed–has returned; that familiar thing is something which ought to have stayed repressed. I use the Barbie doll to explore these ideas.