The sculpture here, Chlora’s Survival Gear, is part of a long term series that hopefully will culminate in a publication and exhibition called “Chlora Gets Real”. Its premise is to explore spiritual development, which involves the unlearning of harmful religious and cultural mores. As Chlora as grown up with me, she’s getting more precocious in her ecclesiology, and more adept at tweaking clichés and ambiguities. Here is her first public exposure, in IMAGE: 

 “Chlora is a character who shows up in my work as an imaginary guide into my childhood and religious background. She looks like a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Anne Frank. When there’s a throbbing in my right ear, a playful disjointedness sets in, and I know Chlora is on the line. My Grandmother Henry and my mother, with four little girls to keep in line, invented the Chlora stories on an as-needed basis. This little tyrant with the odd name got into whatever shenanigans we had just committed. The stories were moralistic and gripping. They began, “Chlora was a bad little girl.” Chlora became so realistic that she grew into a convenient scapegoat: It was Chlora, not me, who chopped up the National Geographics to make collages. She eventually moved on to art books and discovered that she liked tape and anything else that stuck. She was hard on toys. She fantasized about her future in the big city. She innocently garbled her religious training and bungled her friendships, but the nonsense created by Chlora remains openhearted and open-ended.

 Chlora gets activated when there is too much “God-talk” around. When things get obnoxiously earnest or tip into piosity, Chlora gets out the squeaky chalk. She gets anxious over starry-eyed charismatics who revel in smarmy, paint-sucking images of the apocalypse which “God commanded them to do.” Chlora is unnerved by the kind of woo-woo idealism that extols the imagination as the panacea for all problems, as if an active imagination doesn’t go both ways. Hitler had one, and so do the folks who invented 132 styles of pantyhose. She knows art is fun and is also hard work, and she rolls her eyes at glib declarations like, “All of us are artists!” Art jabberwocky, that pretentious aesthetic jargon--especially the self-serving kind, is just as odious to her. Chlora senses when the emperor is wearing no clothes, and like a goody two shoe, she politely says so.

Chlora questions my motives and makes me lighten up. She goes to the Episcopal Seminary with me and helps me confront my own bias. She takes Biblical images literally—that is, as they literally function in context—and then she messes with metaphors.”

( Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion, Number 33, Winter 2001, pp. 89-90, story by Ginger Henry Geyer, "Calling: Art & Signage")