This series was created as a response to the devastating wild fires my state of California suffers yearly. I chose to focus purely on creating beauty out of destruction and experimenting with new materials and techniques. Fire not only kills but also creates new life, new beauty, new growth. Limiting my color palette to mostly black and white I added small touches of red and gold to reference this dichotomy. I wanted to create beautiful abstract pieces that are delicate and graceful yet born of flames. By torching stone paper and mounting it on cradled wood panels these works combine painting and sculpture in a way I found meditative and pleasing.

Fire Series

These paintings are part of a series of very personal work  dealing with transformation, breaking down walls, letting go and spiritual awakening. A continuation of my Berlin Wall series they refer to the time after my immigration from Berlin to the Southwestern United States as a very young woman thrust into the deep end of life far from any family.

Immersing oneself in the Source of All Things, which water represents, brings us back to our origin and the connection we share with each other and our higher selves. Trust and letting go of our own walls is an essential component in this process. Often we have to take leaps of faith and believe the net will appear to catch us even before we see it. We are alone in this journey, yet not at all, rather constantly surrounded, cradled, floating safely.



Water

My new series "Silence of the Lambs" sprang out of the recent U.S. Presidential Elections that brought up memories, anger and revolt in so many women, including me, who have endured oppression, sexual abuse and harassment.  Besides the actual abuses women have also been pressured and shamed into silence but are finally opening up, talking about it and best of all shedding the guilt and shame and placing it where it belongs, on the abusers not the abused. All are done on cradled wood panels (1.5 inches thick) in charcoal and pastel with added mixed media ranging from typewritten vellum, wire, rock, yarn, modeling paste. They measure from 4x4 inches to 8x8 inches.  I'm continuing to work on this series with several more already started.

Silence Of The Lambs

With this continuing series I am using the Berlin Wall as metaphor for all of the walls in my life.
I was born behind the wall in 1962’s West-Berlin, in close proximity to the actual wall, spent my formative years there among a people that in general were very reserved. Within my own family there were walls built up and torn down which shouldn’t have. I realized walls were a major theme running through my life.  Making the resulting very personal paintings public was one way of my breaking down an internal wall I had built up myself. All my life I had erected my own walls of protection and fears but since moving to the wide open spaces of the American Southwest many years ago I had been learning to tear them down.
The paintings examine the endless contradiction and effects of walls.  Walls are real and physical, imagined and psychological. They make visible one’s fears, anxieties and insecurities. They separate and yet offer a common purpose. They divide us yet invite us to scale them and tear them down, to come together again. They offer comfort, though false, yet feed hate and fear. They isolate and protect. Walls keep people out AND in. They shelter us and yet make us want to break free. They repel and tempt. They control and we rebel. They are a prison and a freedom. We can choose to erect them or tear them down. 
Still living in the US and seeing all the new talk about building walls by the shocking new president, this series has taken on a special meaning and received much attention here recently. "In Search Of Peace" has been exhibited in several political themed shows In California as well as at the Kimmel Galleries at NY University and is included in a catalogue along with a personal letter to the President which is being sent to the White House.
I hope to one day exhibit this series in Berlin.



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Daggi Wallace