Kristine Schomaker

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

My work is personal, intense, emotional, and transformative. As a dedicated conceptualist and surrealist autobiographer, I address the de(con)struction of self in relation to society's perception of beauty, but my practice has evolved beyond critique into something more essential: a methodology for processing change itself. For over a decade, I have been cutting up my art—shredding thousands of photographs, slicing through paintings dating back twenty-five years, buzzing off my hair and preserving it in jars, and dismantling mannequins I had painted to represent my virtual avatar. This cutting has been both compulsive and meditative, a way of making space—literally and metaphysically—for transformation. Each cut is a small death, a letting go, a refusal to be trapped by who I was or what I made in the past. The cutting intensified during my battle with kidney cancer, as I have navigated the realities of aging in a culture obsessed with youth and perfection, and through my ongoing struggle with an eating disorder as a plus-size woman. My body, marked by illness, time, and the weight of societal expectations about acceptable bodies, became the site of investigation. How do we live authentically when our physical selves are constantly judged as inadequate by narrow beauty standards? How do we process the shame, the self-hatred, the endless cycle of diet culture and body surveillance that particularly targets women who dare to exist in larger bodies? Now I have cut up...

Artwork