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This website presents samples of my visual work over the
years—my painting, artist’s books, drawing, and my work in
all genres related to the impact of medicine on individuals
and on our culture.
I hope my visitor will note the many LECTURES I have
given and the ARTICLES I have published. They
are an index of the way ideas flow between my visual and
verbal work. The intellectual and verbal aspects of my
experience are as central to my visual art as are my
experiences living in a woman’s body, suffering certain
diseases, or raising children. The life of the mind is
as consuming to me as the emotional life and personal
history.
I am a self-taught painter, working in acrylic. PAINTING
is a means of reflection for me.
While paintings are usually the most forceful-looking works
I make, the process of making them is the most tenuous.
They require extended, open-ended time, and I inevitably
grope with my materials. Painting is sustained
discomfort with a vague promise. The final images
generate themselves from seminal marks, so any initial
conception I may be foolish enough to form about an end is
dissipated early on.
The work I produce surprises me each time by crystallizing
thought or formulating feeling I recognize only at the end.
It is as if something invisible has been brought into being,
distilled from the air by the miserable discomfort of
patient, physical process.
In the ARTIST BOOKS, my intelligence, vision,
history, and my need to make both images and words, come
together. The extensive body of this work is unified
by intimacy, intensity, and an aesthetic that values the
book as conveyance rather than as object. The codex is
infinitely expressive, and I use its range for humor,
horror, the definition of a mood that’s hard to capture, or
the telling of a simple story.
Books have the potential to get burned or banned. I
relate to that history of urgency. I use books to
examine authority, since the book is one of authority’s
primary vehicles.
And MEDICINE’S is one of those authoritative voices
often found in my books. The position of medicine in
our culture is a theme in my work, one on which I have
lectured extensively in connection with my art.
My fascination with the penetration of medicine’s point of
view into quotidian self-perception finds its way into my
paintings, drawings, and books. My concern with
medicine’s authority gives me another way to investigate
language and its power.
My interest in the medicalization of the body has taken me
into privileged settings and given me the opportunity to
draw human anatomy as a subject for emotional exploration.
My series of portrait DRAWINGS of anomalously
developed human infants and fetuses mirror my sense of
myself as fragile human, as mother, lover, and engaged human
being, with whatever reluctance or pain one elects to be so.
MY ART OFTEN TAKES THE VIEWER PLACES ONE MIGHT HESITATE
TO GO: The locked wards of psychiatric hospitals
and the laboratories where these unviable infant bodies are
preserved. I see women struggling to survive suburban
privilege. I ask if cannibalism is sufficiently
understood to be wholly damned.
The events and emotions of my life are the basis for my
work. But autobiography is not formal; it is more
complex than art can encompass. So I create personae
in my work as lifelines I devise for myself and others.
These I throw out to the vast world of people who might
recognize themselves through my work, who might have
questions like mine, who are sufferers of madness,
mysterious pains, and doubtful doubts.
Ann Starr
Columbus, Ohio
2006
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