Odeta Xheka

Our bodies contain stories, songs, memories, and wounds that come alive with every breath. In this sense, I want the viewer to face the work feeling that can never be a static perspective of the female body: the body’s needs or its bruising, the warfare against and within itself, the memory of pleasure and shame, the namelessness of nakedness or its absolute wonder.

The source material for these mixed media pieces is a mixture of pre-cut figurative shapes, lace, sand, and re-appropriations of my own work, typically in the form of shallow relief construction, pasted and layered together to create shading and multilayered structure, so that one feels as if she is not in front of a collage but rather walking through deeply personal memory, peeping under the layers, squinting in an effort to notice the half hidden shapes, impatiently separating the colors from the texture, reassessing the hints as truths.