Mavor, Anne_ "I am Floating"

Artist Statement
I make art to understand the world around me and to heal myself, following the feminist art maxim, the personal is political. My installations, performances, and paintings arise from personal vulnerability and historical inquiry to contradict oppressive systems. Using my life as source material, I have explored and countered sexism, disability, racism, amongst many other subjects.

Currently I use a process of botanical contact printing on vintage and reused fabric to create abstracted forms. The work exists as wall pieces and temporary outdoor installations. Botanical contact printing as I practice it, is a ritual that starts with listening to the plants. All the marks and shapes come directly from plants and the results are unpredictable as they depend on the season, weather, and condition of the plants. Through this tactile process I can access the individual fingerprints of plants directly.

My work has followed a consistent thread over the last ten years: to understand and heal my ancestral relationship to land. Mounds and Stones, a series of encaustic and watercolor paintings of sacred sites in England and Scotland, embraces the ancient landscape where my people came from. I Am My White Ancestors: Claiming the Legacy of Oppression, a touring installation of thirteen life-size photographic portraits of me as my ancestors, builds on the last series. The project explores European-American heritage, my family, and their role in the history of race, class, colonization, and genocide and invites public engagement.

From 2019-2020 I approached connection from the inside with Healing Images, a series of gouache paintings on paper. This process reconnected me to the joy of painting after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Rather than trying to prove anything, please anyone, or promote my career, I focused on enjoyment. Themes of two shapes wanting to connect, and lines of energy winding back to themselves recur in the work. 

My current work, 2021-present, The Plant Messengers and The Plant Beings, continues my deepening relationship with the land. Humans evolved alongside plants, and we rely on each other to grow and survive. For colonizer and other cultures this primary relationship was broken through war, migrations, and disconnection from home. I am interested in healing that ancestral hurt and grief through creating imagery from plant pigments to connect with their life giving energy.