All Images and text copyright Katie Miller 1999-2010. All rights reserved.
Statement
“Pictures of children are at once the most common, the most sacred, and the most
controversial images of our time.” – Ann Higonnet (Pictures of Innocence. Thames
and Hudson:1998)
Simultaneous contradictions - qualities which seem to be opposite yet somehow
coexist - draw me to the imagery of childhood. I am interested in combined
feelings of discomfort and familiarity, and in how a picture of a child can be
both utterly mundane and disturbingly surreal. What happens when presumed
innocence is twisted with a willful sense of knowing, or when the provocateur
and the victim are the same? How can a child be both unnervingly creepy and
hauntingly beautiful at the same time?
Newborns, in particular, are full of contradictions. Grotesque, peeling, bruised
and jaundiced flesh covers each tiny, precious body. Writhing, wrinkly, and
ridiculously proportioned, the neonate inhabits an odd time before the cuteness
of babyhood. He appears to be an alien amalgam incorporating elements of the
human fetus, the gawky adolescent, and the frail elderly, yet we adults are
wired to find him appealing. The newborn seems far too odd to be one of us, but
it is the way we all began.
A decade of interest in human-related sciences such as Anthropology, Sociology,
Psychology, and Neuroscience has likely influenced my work. For the past five
years, I’ve been particularly fascinated by the history of childhood as a
concept, and how today, childhood seems to be in a perpetual state of
redefinition with influences from the media, technology, and globalization.
I love the late 15th – early 16th century in European painting when high realism
began to become paramount to the understanding of faith. Holy figures were now
understood in a corporeal, yet idealized fashion. I feel this is mirrored in
today’s secular adoration of children, and our worship of glorified,
sensationalized, and sexualized media images. This is the basis for painting my
figures to be more “real” than reality: so that they are at once artificial,
ethereal, and hyper-human.
- Katie Miller
June 2010