Barbara Penn makes paintings, drawings, prints and combined-media installations. She uses literary, poetic and everyday sources in her work and merges them with personal and socio/political themes. 

In her monotype, Penn positions a medieval diagram of a woman’s surgical procedure to address the evolution of culture. In early times, surgery would have been used for medical reasons only. More commonly today, rationale has yielded to “the cosmetic” end in itself.  Societal pressure “to nip and tuck” as a means to eternal youth is big business. The viewer might contemplate what this says about us as a culture of women—Whom are we changing for? What role does ego play? Is there an alternative in finding self-acceptance?  

The primary image in the print borrows from an early record of facial surgery.  Penn purposely combines it with Victorian-era script from nineteenth century poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson used plus marks (+) and dashes (—) between words as a kind of variant language, playing with alternatives to end a poem— seen here in her words “ + swelling + fitter for ”.  In the few poems published in Dickinson’s lifetime, alterations “in print” happened without her consent, to her great dissatisfaction. Her wittingly eccentric grammar, syntax and punctuation were regularized and stripped away of her finely honed sense of poetic intension, in many of her works. According to numerous scholars, editions of her work assembled after her death, (even up to the 1950’s), were abundantly altered. These changes were meant to make her work more popularized for the masses, and therefore more saleable—thus changing her original aim.  

This piece also calls up the early installation work that Penn produced in the 1990’s which drew on parallels she found in her own life compared to the biography and poetry of Dickinson.