"Bearing Witness:
Women Victims of War"

It was the newspaper photographs that broke my heart. The daily arrival of women's faces from Kosovo: anguished, stunned, grief stricken, horrified, numbed, hopeless. Silent images portraying destroyed lives. I cut out and saved all the photographs, but I didn't know why.

My installation is entitled "Bearing Witness: Women Victims of War". It is a tribute to all women who have suffered in any war and an effort to make us remember the past, to remind us of the reality of war in the present, and to personalize the suffering of women. The work is a room sized installation comprised of four tiled wall pieces, one floor piece made of handmade clay bricks, a procession of seven clay goddess figures, and a "source book" of twelve framed photocopies of the newspaper photographs that inspired the project. Each piece is accompanied by a quote from a poem or writing selection that I encountered in my research. I have found these words particularly moving and they lend meaning to the pieces.

"Bearing Witness" is a work that I was compelled to make. The women's faces were with me every day and I could so easily picture myself in those pictures. Could I possibly imagine how it must feel to be carrying all my possessions in a single bag, holding my child, walking on a dirt road to a place I didn't know? Where were my brothers, my father, my husband - or worse, did I know? My reading about the war in the former Yugoslavia brought to life words like "collateral damage", "ethnic cleansing", and "genocidal rape". The accounts of the horrors of Srebrenica, the revelations about the "Comfort Women" of Japan and Korea, the atrocities in Rwanda, Afganistan, Darfur - real events that now have faces.