ARTIST STATEMENT

NANCY GOODMAN LAWRENCE

My highly personal figurative collages are based on photographic portraits of family, friends and self or drawings of the model placed in whimsical settings. Maps are a huge resource for my work, less for their literal representations than the endless possibilities they offer in rendering the geography of the human body and the space it occupies. Mountains, oceans and roads become veins, tree branches, rug patterns and clothing, as I surgically manipulate them, bit by bit, from one context to another. I find myself minimizing or beating back the most obvious map references to specific locations, but they have a way of bubbling up in ironic ways. I am constantly engaged in a dance with the formal, the psychological and the subliminal.