MONICA BOCK

As an artist, I'm interested in the life of the body. With my work in sculpture and installation,
I observe and record, but also resist the loss to which bodies are subject. Influencing my visual imagination is the proximity, in my experience, of Catholic churches and my mother’s anatomy labs, of religious reliquaries and medical specimen cases, of ecstatic saints and dissected cadavers, of promised eternity and matter-of-fact death. I conflate sacred, scientific and domestic imagery in work that is often based on castings of the body and of found objects. I use ephemeral substances such as salt and soap, as well as apparently durable materials such as porcelain and iron. My cross-disciplinary projects include photography, sound, performance, and poetry. For the past ten years I have focused thematically on the ordinary extremes of maternal life, as witness to both its intimacy and its alienation. Now suddenly finding myself approaching memoir age, I see my work’s content turning more frankly toward self-portraiture.