Maureen Burdock

Maureen Burdock was born in Germany and spent the first years of her life in Europe during the cold war era of the 1970’s. Her father was a foreign language correspondent from West Germany, her mother a foreign language teacher whose family fled the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany in the 1940’s. Born Koch-von Reitzenstein, Burdock adopted the name of this root as an adult interested in folk medicine. Burdock has always been a prolific artist, constructing large-scale multimedia exhibitions about themes of war and its effects on civilian populations. She has won awards for her surrealist work and had numerous solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

Women work twice as hard as men to get half the recognition. Being aware of this is essential to the survival of a woman artist. Though women make up more than half the world’s population, we are considered a minority and continually under-represented. As an underdog, I relate to other underdogs and want to find ways in which our stories overlap. I want to universalize my personal story as much as possible. It isn’t good to suffer or to laugh alone.

The theme running through all my work is transmutation. Essential to my experience as a woman, as an immigrant, and as an artist is the knowledge that I can take a bad situation and transmute it with humor and with grace.

I think of all artists as the carrion eaters of society—we take the damaged, the dying and the rotten and recycle it, through innovation and imagination, into something new and sometimes better. Like vultures, artists are not always appreciated because the things that feed us often seem repulsive. Women artists, especially, are well-suited to the role of Valkyries, Harpies, Sirens, spotting with a bird’s-eye view those things which are in need of regeneration. We are sensitive, passionate and sometimes scary.

I am very honored to be a part of this feminist art database, and to share this branch of the art tree with some of the artists I’ve admired and been inspired by most.