Vanessa Woods

Instagram: vanessa_woods_studio

Website: http://www.vanessawoods.com

Bio: Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art. Since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her artwork and films have been exhibited throughout the United States including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards including a Center for Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Her work has been published in The New York Times and Harpers, among others. Woods lives in Pacifica, CA with artist Josh Smith and their three children.

Statement: Vestiges (2017–), is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, sculpture, and 16mm films to interrogate the malleability of motherhood and its profound connections to boundaries and mortality. In the project, I investigate the tensions of motherhood while acknowledging its paradoxes. I show a body turned inside out and remade through my children’s bodies. I explore the extraordinary fact that the maternal body and mind are physically and biologically remade through the process of becoming a mother. I also examine the conflicts that live within maternal experience; the need to simultaneously hold on and let go of my children, to extend my body to them and reclaim it for myself, and the physical experience of being both embodied and disembodied. The work in Vestiges is highly iterative, it shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed, rebuilt, and adapting. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble. The range of visual strategies and the hybrid approach to image-making in Vestiges suggests that motherhood contains multitudes. Mothers move in tandem with their children, adapting to their evolving needs as they change and grow. At each stage of motherhood, the role of the maternal body, the mind, and the mother adapt. Vestiges illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience and pluralizes it, showcasing how maternal perspective can reshape current discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.