About

Artist Statement
Vanessa Woods' collages utilize disparate associations to re-imagine and re-contextualize contemporary and historical narratives. The material for her collages comes from a broad range of sources, including art history books, photo books, vintage/contemporary magazines, found paper ephemera, and her own photographs. In each piece that she creates, the original image is decontextualized through the act of cutting and it’s meaning re-contextualized through new associations. In her current body of work, M/Other, Woods uses the birth of her children as the genesis for an expansive project exploring the maternal body and the conditions of motherhood.

* Bio*
Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art. Since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including Filter Space in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards, including a Center for Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Djerassi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harpers, among others. Woods lives in Pacifica, CA, with artist Josh Smith and their three children. Her first monograph, M/Other (working title) will be published by Luhz Press in 2027.