A Puzzling Voyage

 

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Puzzling Voyage

Five colorful beacons were installed around the Fort Point neighborhood during Spring Open Studios 2016.  The interactive sculptures—made with bright paint and reclaimed junk—were inspired by way-finding, geometry, and visual perception.  Each contained a puzzle, illusion, or brain-twister for viewers to ponder.

Temporary Public Art, created for Fort Point Open Studios and funded by Fund for the Arts, a public art program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Acrobatic Birthing Images

Here’s Bertha:6_Cobb_Standing

Here are some paintings:

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Yoga_web

 

Party_web

 

Cards_web

 

Pool_web

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This project is a series of images of women casually giving birth in public, social, and leisure situations.  The birth-giver is aware but not overly concerned with the birth. There is no sense of danger or urgency in these births; there is neither shock, repulsion, nor celebration.

The idea came to me suddenly, and at first as comedy. However, the longer I spent with the project, the more layers of meaning I found and the more questions I had both in regards to my personal relationship to motherhood and society’s relationship to motherhood, as well as the representation of motherhood.

My own response to friends and acquaintances who have over the past few years become mothers, has been a mix of sentimental swooning and heartless rejection. I feared that this new role would irrevocably turn my friends into people I no longer knew, instantly transform them into a drones who could only think and talk about babies. This of course proved not to be true, and a rather insulting preconception.

I think that one can learn the most about oneself by investigating the things that are both attractive and repulsive. Many women, including myself, feel this way about birth and motherhood. While I sometimes secretly imagine that I will one day have children, I decline to imagine any particular sacrifices I might make, any shift in identity I may assume, or any friends who could reject me or grow apart.

I chose to work with birth itself because this is a transformative moment of motherhood in which the self becomes the other. Who should participate in and control birth? What are our expectations of mothers? What are mothers’ expectations of themselves? How does our view of a woman as a subject change when she becomes a mother?

By taking a socially private and medicalized event and taking it to the other extreme, these images are meant to be jarring, challenging, grotesque, and funny. Their aim is not to suggest that birth should take place at a cocktail party, but rather use the absurd to bring into focus and question our cultural perceptions of birth and motherhood, and acknowledge our ever-remaining closeness to biology and natural cycles, despite our changing lives and built surroundings.

While much energy has been exerted to call out the sexual objectification of women and girls, the quieter, more obscured objectification of mothers is an equally strong piece of the puzzle that defines women in relation to an other, rather allowing us full personhood.

I am excited to present this work which has taken me almost two years to research and complete. These questions however, are ongoing. Presenting birth and motherhood in a critical way that neither parades it as an ultimate goal, nor diminishes its importance has allowed me to reexamine my assumptions, and clear the ground to re-imagine what it could be.

Printmaking

This is a project I facilitated for Fort Point Fall ’15 Open Studios.  We made monoprints by rubbing out designs, inking up using pattern materials like leaves, mesh and lace, and blocked out ink using ripped paper.  The prints were hand-pressed using a homemade brayer.  We used acrylic block printing ink and re-purposed tiles as a plate and printed on newsprint (it’s quite absorbant).  Participants were mostly kids 4-8, but a few free-spirited adults joined in too!

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Illuminated Geometric Forms

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lantern

Here are a couple examples of the lanterns we made in a community event in Fort Point using brown paper bags, tissue paper, glue, and a variety of scissors and hole punchers.  The lanterns were illuminated with LED candles.

About My Art Workshops:

My teaching philosophy centers on creating space and time to explore materials, personal expression, and critical investigation.

I offer this strategy to my students much in the same way that I do for myself in my own studio, with the bulk of my energy devoted to providing the context in which to play.

I specialize in early childhood education and elder populations with a focus on process over product.

I enjoy teaching active processes with large motor movements, and I love including cross-disciplinary content: particularly physical science, geometry, botany.  My influences include aspects of Montessori philosophy.

Contact me at mail@emilycobb.com to inquire about a workshop for your community.