Monica Neiman Sotomayor

The female experience has always been the focus of my work as an artist. Studies in phenomenology and critical theory address themes related to the human body, the nature of humanity, and its relationship to empathy, ethics, and violence. By choice, my studio practice and the philosophical research are connected, a reciprocal system, a reflective process, where each informs the other. The contemporary body existing as embodied, as both object and subject, can experience varying degrees of violence, oppression and opposition due to historical, societal, cultural, political and gendered structures in place around the world. We experience our bodies from the inside, but we also experience our bodies, as well as the bodies of others as they appear to us, from the outside. As a sculptor I work with melding glass and metal as a hybrid material, a metaphorical skin, within which the female experience can reside as self/other or subject/object. The effects of violence, trauma, pain and memory within and on our own bodies can be visualised in the materiality of glass and metal – warping, fusing, shattering, or expanding depending on forces applied.