Big Pumpkin Series

“I think facing the camera was intuitive. Robin was photographing and I wanted to face him. Because I love him. So I was showing love to the camera.” – SMW.

“I may live in a city in a fourth floor walk up apartment with no elevator, balcony, garden etc. but as in an early performance photograph (‘Sands Ocean’) where I am biting or holding part of a coniferous tree in my mouth in the winter, nature is the natural setting for my activities and I am just part of the bigger picture.” – SMW.

“I am in relation to flora and fauna but I feel much more fragile and undefined and actually insignificant, that’s why I love perfume, it has no visual or physical form. I feel like a combination of thoughts and memories, like Carolee Schneemann on an acid trip in the 60s that she wrote a text about called ‘Hormones Circling’ (1966?), reproduced I think in the artist book Parts Of A Body House Book. In the end I wanted to melt into nature, become part of it… dissolve…” – SMW.

“In the series, you are often holding a cigarette. In one of the photographs, you also urinate into the vegetation. Does smoking/urinating in nature mean something concrete in this piece?” – AC. “This also goes back to Hannah Wilke. Who peed in a photo in the 70s which she made into a conceptual art work with text from a male writer. A very complex gesture, which she was so good at. Urinating and smoking are both natural acts, so it had to do with just being natural and human and animal in nature. Cigarettes, when I did smoke, felt very artificial although smoking is such a pleasureable activity. I used to smoke about a pack a day for 10 years.” – SMW.

“I think part of why I faced the camera was as always to give back to the women who came before me who got naked. My genital/penis is an important part of that. Not that I revere it, not any more than other parts of my body (I think I revere my ass/hole), but it’s a gender marker.” – SMW.