Homes for the Disembodied

source: marytuma

My work addresses issues of the transformation of the body and the spirit through the use of clothing forms applied to found objects or placed within a contextual environment. The use of old fabrics and found objects is important in creating a work or environment that evokes a feeling of loss, or distant memory. I am interesting in the sorting of images from the past, images that are like shadows or ghosts, something not quite whole and no longer real but still of great influence and power.

In most of these works there is evidence of loss—an allusion to the passing of time; a vacant space within a form once occupied; an identity that merges fully with it’s environment. To speak of this loss, I superimpose worlds. “Bodies” of sorts are caught up in unmistakably alien forms that speak of our transformative nature. A “skeletal” object or structure, which provides a context and framework, is redressed within a sheer, ghost-like skin: the resulting forms are like skins and bones—the interior and exterior of one possible system.

There is an intangible “place” where the body becomes an emotional landscape. Though I cannot define this, it is a goal of the work to describe that place. Ideally, this leads to work both mournful and humorous, simultaneously real and surreal.
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source: marytuma

Born in California in 1961, Mary Tuma began sewing and crocheting with her mother at an early age. Her love of these processes led her to begin her formal study of art as an apprentice at Beautiful Arts Hall in Kerdassa, Egypt, where she learned to weave tapestries. Later, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Costume and Textile Design from the University of California at Davis, and then went on to study women’s fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In 1994, she earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona, where she studied with Professor Gayle Wimmer. In 1997, she began teaching art at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, where she now serves as an Associate Professor and the head of the Fibers Program.

Tuma has shown her work in various venues in the United States, including the Crocker Art Museum, the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, The Bridge in New York City, the Station Museum in Houston and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI. Outside of the US, she has shown work at Al Wasiti and Al Hoash in Jerusalem, the International Center of Bethlehem, Birzeit University Museum, Birzeit. West Bank, Kid Aileck Hall, Tokyo, The Maruki Gallery in Hiroshima, among others.

Tuma’s work has appeared in Art in America, Dar Al-Hayat, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Counterpunch, NYArts, Mother Jones, The San Francisco Chronicle, Worker’s World, The Jordan Star, and many others.

She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her two adorable dogs, Monkey and Lulu.