Diane Leigh Whitehead is a New York based visual artist.
About MY Work
immure:
verb | to enclose within or as if within walls; imprison; to shut (oneself) away from society
The feeling of being immured …. This is how I have felt as a female in both a familial and societal way. I could see the world but would not participate fully in it for fear - real or imagined - of being rejected. My work, intuitively manifested, reveals this sense of confinement through drawing, sculpture and installation.
In the renderings of the earlier drawings, these expressionistic works suggest human energies and forms and figures imprisoned between 2 x 4 wall studs. My work evolved into three dimensional installations, constructed and deconstructed from building materials -- graphite, paper, paint, wire, wood, steel, plaster, fiberglass, glass and electricity.
The figures and “energies” push out of and begin to compromise the rigid structural integrity of the facades, frameworks and containments they have been squeezed into. The freedom of mark making in each piece is literally blocked by architectural structure and rigid materials. The buzz of the lines and forms of the primarily female figures, imprisoned in such tight frameworks, appear emaciated and fragmented and create a tension that makes us question our personal and social constructs as well as our assumptions about the materials and the structures themselves.
What happens as we stretch into the limbo between the safety of social and physical norms that compose and often imprison us, and the fear and uncertainty caused by the destabilization or collapse of those constructs?
The unknown.