Rose Pearson

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I recently read that Judy Chicago told another mother that she had to choose between her children and her art. Chicago believed that she was only stating a fact, not giving an ultimatum. I am a woman whose professional artistic practice began simultaneously with the decision to become a mother; the subject of my painting is tied to the levels of experience encountered in my daily life. I do so because family history is a microcosm of all human drama. The body of work that I have created has examined such concepts as infertility, the maternal, the familial, femininity and rural domesticity.

I am frequently made aware of, and interested in documenting, the passing of time.  This is evident in my most recently completed project called "The Teapot Inquiry" where I took a daily digital photograph of a child's silver teapot for a period of thirteen months.  The teapot travelled with me and was photographed in a variety of places.  Accompanying the digital photographs was a daily journal entry and sketch of the teapot photograph.  The 396 digital images became a wealth of references for image making.

This interest in the passage of time has led me to the Canadian artist Jack Chambers and his creative philosophy of "perceptualism".  He wanted to create paintings "where reality is so imminent that one feels he has stepped off the conveyor belt of time momentarily and actually glimpses the world in pause".  I am also interested in capturing moments of pause, for it is in these moments when time has stopped that I become more aware of it passing.  In particular I am interested in finding these pauses in locations that my family has called  "home" - the century old farm where I grew up near Peterborough, Ontario, and my current home in Haliburton County.

I am aware that my methods of working and my concerns, which are generative and which deal with an ideal of beauty in the domestic and familial, may seem out of sync with current conceptions and qualities of art. In a logos dominated, patriarchal society, I hope to provide some balance by focusing on eros and on the matriarchal.