Joy Broom
ANCESTRAL NARRATIVES (MORE STORIES)
This work is about History and Memory, representing my engagement with inherited family memorabilia. It’s a collaboration and an ongoing conversation as I deconstruct saved old family letters, scrapbooks and photo albums. I intend to exhibit numerous small series.
My work has a long history of layering visual elements of the natural world: insects, seeds, trees/veins, cellular magnifications. An ovoid shape represents an insect winter hibernation cluster; branches hint at circulatory systems, as well as to literal family trees. Combined with my ballpoint and pencil drawings these pieces become ruminations of my own history.
I’m combining the beauty of biology with the symmetrical order of icons and altarpieces. I use purified beeswax as a skin, to conceptually bind, protect and ritualize. I like that my studio smells like church. It’s my intent to progress through aspects of the strictly personal to engage in wider historical and biological concepts and questions.
For more information about the artist, please visit her website.