Object number2024.7.4
Form Unmoored #2
Portfolio/SeriesFrom the series Lacuna
Date2023
Artist
Vanessa Woods
CultureAmerican
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 16 1/4 x 13 15/16 in. (41.3 x 35.4 cm)
Sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in. (50.5 x 40.6 cm)
Sheet: 19 7/8 x 16 in. (50.5 x 40.6 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, gift of Mrs. Frederick Ferris Thompson, by exchange
On View
Not on viewPeriod21st c
Classification(s)
Vassar Exhibitions
Label TextPart of Vanessa Woods’s Lacuna series (2023–2024), these works explore cutouts as organic forms and as openings through which maternal identity undergoes constant change. This process reorients our spatial relationships, as she explains: “the original image is decontextualized through the act of cutting, its meaning re-contextualized through new associations. In many ways, this is like parenthood, where becoming a parent erases the pre-parent identity and reassigns it as something else.” The cutouts reverse conventional notions of void: while absence typically reads as dark or empty, Woods renders gaps as a luminous presence. These openings become sites of partial, uncertain holding, refusing fixed meaning. As in poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s notion of gap gardening, “the spaces between” cultivate rather than explain, creating new forms of maternal knowing by way of tending to what cannot be wholly grasped.
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