swoon

Swoon was born in 1977. She Lives and works in New York City.

At first I was so wound up about being a woman in a man’s field that I didn’t want to talk about it at all. I was making art out on the street, and no one knew I was a woman for at least a year, maybe three. I was adamant about my ‘neutrality’ so to speak. I was concerned with my ability to create things which would be read as universally human, and not tether me to a gender identity, which, I feared, would engulf what I had to bring, and chuck me into that marginalized, patronized place I associated feminism. I wanted to sneak in through the air shaft and show up whole.

When people started to call me that guy Swoon, I just let them. Not that I wanted to hide and be considered male, I just thought, when it flips around, and the truth comes out, something in our assumptions will be flipped too… It was a little mischief. And while I know this has nothing properly to do with feminism, somewhere in all the working day and night, and fingers to the bone and aching tendon, I felt that I was out to win one for our team.

Now I strive to be lucid and imaginative and honest. I want to put new wrinkles in our language. I want one day, to be toe to toe with any one who ever lived, and ever persued the path that I too am on. And then some, honey. And then some. And what’s more, I want no gasps of surprise, though I may have enjoyed them, when people see that the things that I make, are made by a woman.