Pam Patterson

I practice my art, as my life, from the location of woman -- white, almost middle-class, middle-aged, single mother with a disability. I use the specific experiences of this location to inform, disrupt or challenge not only the accepted or "normalized" image of Western white woman, but the traditional formal concerns of art. In doing so, I hope to embrace a more inclusive process for living and art making.

The forms I choose to use in my work are suited to this process. My performances, mixed media installations and videos, while they are at first glance clean, sometimes minimal and formally structured, do, in fact, contain many personal and specific images or texts. My intention is to discuss how women have been/are being formed and to reveal our attempts to negotiate or resist this formation. The tension in the work is between the personal/subjective and the formal/objective, which raises questions for me as the nature of feminist research practices, feminist art practices, and women's evolving roles as parents, workers and partners in a Western technological society.

The works range from performances such as Body as Site ( Sight) which negotiates the deconstruction of a museum interpreter's role, to installations such as "A Birth Project" which discusses my daughter's birth within the larger issues surrounding the legalization of midwifery care in Ontario, and "Mapping the Familial" in which I look specifically at my own family and trace my learning of my gendered roles, violence and racism. In "Communitas in Context," I looked to a visual interpretation of relationships within a feminist community of difference.

Pam Patterson (PhD) has, for 35 years, been active in the art, dance, theater and women’s communities. Her research, performance and teaching have focused on embodiment in art and performance practice, the body in art and performance, disability studies, women & gender studies, and feminist culture. She taught movement for theatre for 20 years and performed as a corporal mime, dancer, and actor. Since 1983 her artistic practice has been in visual and performance art. She is currently Artistic Director for the interdisciplinary arts research, practice and presentation program, WIAprojects (www.wiaprojects.com) at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE), OISE/UT and teaches at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art & Design University. As a performance and visual artist she was a founding member of FADO Performance and ARTIFACTS and has exhibited and performed internationally.
http://pampatterson-performanceartist.blogspot.com/p/awards.html