“Dolly the Electric Sheep (Ogmore by Sea)” Watercolours, Acrylics, Coloured Glue, Fabric, Pen & Ink on Posterboard. 8½" x 12"
The first incarnation: I was 13 and had just returned from a short trip to Wales when my parents took my brother and I on a month-long trip to Europe. We ran for our Heathrow plane back to Anchorage; we missed it, and so we went to Wales during the three-day wait for the next Alaskan-bound flight (British Airways still had direct flights to Alaska in those days; Prince William was born when we were mid-air and they offered free champagne to all legal adults). I was very impressed by Welsh Nationalism and by Ogmore-by-Sea in particular, where my brother and I went exploring in caves and ruins and found something that looked like a dragon's egg. The site was haunted by a Blue Lady, a type of ghost. I painted this on my return in commemoration for some local children's painting group. I specifically remember trying to put a real silver lining in the cloud. Then I redid the painting during a nightmarish trip down the Alcan highway with my best friend, the second worst month of my life so far. My boyfriend and I had split, badly; my friend and I were squabbling, badly; I was coughing up blood from a cat allergy, badly. Throughout this trip I drew whirly designs in coloured ink on my old painting. Sometimes when I look at my paintings, I can remember every emotion I felt at the time that I sketched, and this is one of them. As I occasionally paint as a method of sorting through my thoughts and opinions, my associations with my paintings are not always happy and often ambivalent. I added a highly decorated frame (with little black sheep saying "one for my master, one for my dame") in 1997 and renamed this Dolly the Electric Sheep to be topical (a comment on the appropriation of bodies human and animal for scientific research), but I later removed the frame and kept the name. The frame was hideous yellow-green and I burnt it in a bonfire one year.
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