Artist Statement:
My work is an exploration of my lived experience as a cis, queer woman with chronic illness. In order to feel less alone, and to see myself as a part of the greater community of female-born patients throughout time, I source imagery from the history of medicine to remix, collage, and reinterpret. I manipulate these cold, instructional illustrations originally created by figures of authority into new narratives that place the patients in the center of the story in order to address issues such as medical patriarchy, physical isolation, and bodily anxiety. These new images are then transferred to the medium of the carpet, where the wool and silk yarns I use introduce color and softness to make my stories tactile and approachable. 

The body of work in Old Wives’ Tales, much of which is presented here for the first time, combines source material from a variety of eras, including medieval Europe, the Victorian era in the United States, and the post-Roe world in which we now live. By collapsing time in this way, I ask the viewer to reflect on how much progress has actually been made in the push for bodily autonomy since the dark ages of medicine.

Bio:
Jodie Mim Goodnough is a multidisciplinary artist based in Pawtucket, RI. She attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine in 2007 and received her MFA from Tufts University in 2013. Goodnough is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, a RISCA Grant in Photography, and a Tufts University Alumni Travel Grant, and has attended residencies at UCross Foundation, Wassaic Project,and ChaNorth, among others. Her work has been shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including at Spring/Break Art Show in New York, ArtPort Kingston, and in the solo exhibition Biophilia at the Newport Art Museum in Newport, RI. Goodnough is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI.