GWEN CHARLES
Video Description: The artist lies horizontally with her head resting on her arm in the background, out of focus; while her hand caresses and cradles a very large spiny cactus in the focused foreground.
This is a new video work about caregiving for a sick child.
Looking at the tasks of grooming, I have been mimicking the motions of caretaking and caregiving in the natural environment in this series of performances and videos where plants become stands-ins for the person being cared for. If we conceptualize the Earth as a body, I am also grooming the earth. Caretaking becomes earth care, community care and in turn, self-care.
Petting a spiny cactus is feels very close to my caregiving experience lately. A prickly patient who wants to be cared for but bristles at the slightest offense. Still I care for the prickly patient, and consider the metaphor of being like a cactus: its protective exterior protects its soft storage of water inside, it has great endurance and strength to survive in new environments and situations. And the cactus is adaptable and strong. A reminder that we will endure and survive through the difficult seasons of our life.
Uterus Slingshot, gwen charles. Routed wood & polymer tourniquet, felted wool, 10 x 12 in. 2021.
Uterus Slingshot was made the week after S.B. 8 was instituted in Texas, in September 2021, an unconstitutional law that is an assault on patients, their health care providers and their support systems.
All People deserve to make decisions about their own bodies and have access to essential health care, which includes abortion. We must defend our constitutional rights. We will Fight back. Making the Uterus into a weapon allows us to shoot back at those who take our rights away. Our rights are threatened and the protections violated set under the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. We are not ovary reacting –
Reminder: In New York and New Jersey, slingshots are considered dangerous weapons. Title 2c - The New Jersey Code Of Criminal Justice Section 2C:39-3(e) makes possession of any type of slingshot without “any explainable lawful purpose” a felony of the fourth degree. Pennsylvania allows slingshots to be purchased and used without regulation.
I explore the female experience through sculptural costumes, movement and the body. The past ten years I have been working primarily in video and photography, an extension of live performative actions starting in the early 1990’s.
I reflect on the ever-changing world and the changing needs of the human body: The transformation from maiden to mother, with the physical transformation of the body through pregnancy and children rearing, as a caretaker, while at the same time honoring the mental and emotional changes growing into a mature adult, the adaptations in aging and the progress in loss and in grief….these changes all connected to my roles as mother and caretaker, reflected in artworks exploring impermanence and daily transformation, biologically, socially, and geographically.
New York based multi-disciplinary artist gwen charles interjects the performing body, often her own, into an exploration of the female experience, into non-proscenium formats interweaving sculpture, movement & video. Performances, often in alternative spaces, take inspiration from everyday objects, dreams and historical references, and merge elements of reality, fantasy and absurdity.
gwen charles has a studio in the historic Church Street Montclair, NJ, USA. I acknowledge that Montclair is situated on unceded traditional territories of the Lenape nation homeland. I honor and respect the Lenape ancestors and people of the past, present, and future.