Interview with Eileen Ferara

(To view images from the "Mother of God" organized by participants in the _gaia collective's Wonder Women residency project from which these questions come from please visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/d0ris/sets/72157594513527182/)

Noelle Lorraine Williams: In what ways does your work manipulate the viewer?

Eileen Ferara: The Pyramid Texts wall and floor work manipulates the viewer by creating an enticing space with textures, colors and images. By creating a whole environment on the wall and on the floor, I hope to draw the viewer into this world, and get them to spend time looking closer at the story and details of the work.

Noelle Lorraine Williams: In what ways is your work a manipulation of sight and touch?

Eileen Ferara: The work is a visual story to be “read” or interpreted by the viewer. I often use different materials, which is the tactile part of my work, and the Bee Spellbook is a book for the viewer to page through. I like the intimacy involved in allowing the viewer to hold the art as an object.

Noelle Lorraine Williams: How do you manipulate the material to rework our understanding of history and contemporary culture?

Eileen Ferara:With humor! In referencing ancient Egypt I am putting my story in a place with which everyone will have some familiarity, but much of the story is my own fictional fantasy

Noelle Lorraine Williams: How do you create a conversation around the manipulation of women’s bodies?

Eileen Ferara: I am trying to have a conversation that works on different levels – for example one idea that lead me to this project was our cultural obsession for women to maintain youth and beauty sometimes seemingly at any price. Looked at in another way, there are larger ideas - mortality, death and resurrection.

Noelle Lorraine Williams: How does a “shared dialogue” and collective art process effect what you create? How does it manipulate the idea of the ‘individual” art creativity? How did the process speak to or not of the theory of a “collective unconscious”?

Eileen Ferara: For me art is never created in a vacuum, each individual artist’s creations are always informed by their environment, and what they look at and experience. The shared dialogue process was a wonderful opportunity to experience a supportive collective of women artists-each working on their own individual work, but also helping to provide each other with impressions and suggestions throughout the development of each project. For me, I think it helped me to look at presenting my work in a totally new way. It was also lots of fun to watch everyone’s projects develop in its own unique way over the course of the 6 weeks.