r e b e c c a * v a u g h a n
embroider@rocketmail.com

The primary inspirational source and content of my artwork has centered around gift economies and the cultural and biological methods by which we regulate and maintain our social relationships. Exploring as direct, as intimate a relationship to audience members as I can, I create sculptural installations, conceptual performances and evolving relational projects. Often these include such elements as those of gender-specific experiences: hand-knitting and needlework techniques, arduously created and intended expressly for the dedication to a loved person. I also employ natural media, such as pheromones, heat and electricity, which are intended to enact human intimate association. My intent is to explore the unique resonance between organisms and the manners in which they embody the concepts of distribution and networks. The flavor of the work is often manipulative and sentimental.

My relational performance pieces reflect my interest in the cultural and biological interactions that occur between parties. Gift-giving is a redundant transaction, in that it is not necessary to health or safety. Most importantly, though, it is a method by which we direct and preserve our social relationships. In my performance, Occasion (1999), I intended to strip-away those automatic behaviors of gift exchange, revealing ways in which we uphold our connections in a very coded manner. A series of verbal requests and orders was given as a requirement to receive my gift as I stated, “please do not thank me for the gift, wait until you get home to open it and never discuss the item inside.” Audience members encountered their own habitual and scripted responses to gift transaction through my unexpected and restructured social custom. As well, I created a dispersal of objects that spread throughout the community. When audience members opened the gifts, they found that the gift I gave were every gift that has ever been given to me, and an addressed, stamped and unsealed ‘thank you’ card written to the original giver of that gift. This allowed for the new recipient to understand the significance of the object and send the ‘thank you’ to the original giver. Consequently, audience members are offered the chance to widen the space of the gift sentiment.

In a succeeding project, my work explored the invisible manners in which our bodies relate to each other. Lure (2001-present) is inspired by the role of pheromones, particularly in the rancher’s practice of skinning a stillborn calf to drape its hide on an orphan calf. The stillborn’s mother, smelling her progeny’s scent, subsequently permits the orphan to nurse from her. Lure sends out my scent as a signal in a real and metaphorical effort to attract my birth mother, whom I have never met. By distributing and networking my scent to and with numerous women my age, whom I call satellites, I challenge the physical and emotional boundaries of the singular self as well as concepts of motherhood and daughterhood.
These cultural and biological elements mark an area where a multitude of values and traditions intersect, making it a charged and personal topic to explore. In addition to the reasons behind social and biological customs, are the media themselves which, often in my sculptures and relational works, embody people and become embued with a liveliness of their own. In my work, cultural custom and biology provide a unique resonance between human and between humans and objects.