dana donaty

Lives and works in Boynton Beach, FL, USA

Artist statement

Illness fractures our sense of belonging in the world. I make work that asks what it means to inhabit a body shaped by illness. Grounded in lived experience, my work connects the personal to broader questions of women’s health, care, and mortality. Research is an important part of my practice, connecting my experience to a larger history of women’s health and medicine, as well as practices of care and healing. I am interested in how women’s bodies and knowledge have been overlooked and undervalued, and in questions about whose pain is taken seriously, whose knowledge is valued, and who gets to tell the story of women’s bodies. Using vibrant color that insists on the excruciating pleasure of being alive and maximalist aesthetics, I create fiber works, paintings, and installations that draw on the body as a source. In my current fiber work, female bodies, lush landscapes, medicinal plants, and medical imagery come together in densely layered scenes, where the natural world pushes up against the medical one. My work unfolds through punch needle, layering, stitching, and accumulation. The repetition of pushing yarn through cloth, one loop at a time, becomes a slow act of tending—not so different from caring for a body. Grievance, grief, and gratitude form the emotional framework, allowing heartache, humor, rage, and joy to coexist within the same image.

Artwork