HEATHER MOLECKE
Installation Artist/ Performer/ Sculptor

 Artist Statement

 

I am an object maker, performer, and installation artist. My artistic practice is based on social alienation and the experience of being an outsider. Links between the viewer, subject, and artistic process create a dramatic, immersive experience in my installations which explore the terror of an alienated reality, whether real or perceived. I use techniques of observation, magnification, and exaggeration to confront the absurdity of life – the object of my satirical intent.

 

The environments I have constructed incorporate fabricated and assemblage sculpture, video projection and live performance, to dramatize the relationship between past and present. I seek to show how the past persists and insists in our present, and how the present can be seen to influence the past. Gaming in this way with the arrow of time allows me to create a heightened reality, at once strange and familiar, a distorted mirror in which we nevertheless recognize ourselves.

 

Most recently, I am intrigued by the phenomenon of hysteria, which is a diagnosis that has forced many women into insane asylums. I have been researching the complexities of hysteria through analysis and questioning the thinking that normalized the incarceration of emotionally expressive, resilient women. This subject has previously been explored in the work of the Surrealists and, later, in the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois. While I take for my starting point the analyses of Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, I go further and adopt a more empathic approach in order to examine the relationship between a diagnosis of hysteria and personal histories of sexual trauma. In my new work, it led me to establish visual and suggested associations between sexual abuse and the later onset of mental illness.

 

-Heather Molecke