Sandra Matthews

Artist Statement      Resume      Image Thumbnails      Printable Version

Artist Statement

A “homeland” is a place, mythical or actual, to which one can feel a deep attachment, a place to which one might long to return. Yet every actual piece of land, whatever its nationality, has layers of complicated human history embedded in it.

“Homeland” is itself a term with a history. Adolf Hitler used its German equivalent -“Heimat”- to invoke a sentimental nationalism which masked the brutality behind it. In current American parlance, the term “homeland security” is used to justify overt and covert violent actions.

These composite images combine photographs of the wooded landscapes near my home - areas that are overgrown but in fact have long been inhabited - with photographs made in other parts of the world. Working on the computer, I arrange the elements of each image in visual strata to imply archeology, and embed a word in each layer. The relationships between the words and images are open to interpretation in personal, political, and philosophical terms.

In the “Homeland Scrolls”, I am trying to reclaim a sense of the multiple histories, many of them painful, most of them forgotten, that are connected to any landscape available to human view.

Artist Statement      Resume      Image Thumbnails      Printable Version