ARTIST STATEMENT

My artwork has always revolved around the female figure as a central point to the divine feminine, the embodiment of the sacred.  In 2003, I received my first grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women to produce a series of photographic altars based on the sacred feminine.  In 2005, I received my second grant from the foundation to produce a body of digital photomontages based on family archetypes and genetic coding about my most notorious relative, General Pancho Villa of Mexico.

However, my artwork began a shift the moment that Cancer entered into the relationship between my partner and myself.  His diagnosis and subsequent death changed not only my life but also my art.   During his nine month battle with the disease, I was drawn to color and a heightened state of beauty.  My work contained everything my life at this time did not.  I began creating Madonna and saint figures that resonated calmness and an ethereal quality that provided me with a sense of peace outside my routine of impersonal doctors and sterile hospitals.  Using vintage photographs containing scuffmarks and scratches as most of the centerpieces for my compositions, I had the factor of decay already present.  These marks represent the one dark element within this series. Building upon them further through added, digital manipulation, I am providing a visual expression of the deterioration associated with age, disease and ultimately, of course, death. This work is my way of surviving the abandonment created by death through the act of creation as a means of self-expression and self-preservation.

All images and site contents copyrighted 2007 by Suzanne Gonsalez