Headlands residency application

I am working on my application for the Headlands Center for the Arts in northern California.
Inspired by the Art in Odd Places application I finished on Friday, it seemed logical to continue with another application today.
With generous help, here is the updated version:

My work is about discovering new ways to question social “norms” as they relate to marginal positions women have held in society, as well as how women have been depicted in art. Even today, women are referred to and portrayed in ways that are unconsciously inherited from antiquity, and remain largely gender-biased. I question this modern acceptance by peeling back the layers of commonly recognized ideas, words and images, and bring to light the process by which they have been originally accepted.
The use and re-interpretation of iconic female imagery, repetitious performances of actions and ideas, and working with text have been predominant choices in my work. This has been to validate the seemingly mundane actions that are typically associated with “women’s work” and venerate them in a more public way. From cleaning performances where I methodically scrub floors in public spaces, to employing Morse code to translate famous texts into highly ornamental necklaces, I am interested in re-thinking notions of the feminine in an attempt to understand how it exists in relation to the male gaze.
I am part of the collaborative Meaning Cleaning, which performs public cleanings as a way to take responsibility for shared environments; in addition, we play with social codes and notions of acceptable public behavior. Our actions provide a fundamentally different approach to the perceived lack of care for the immediate surroundings; our focus as artists is on the foundation beneath our feet, to be reminded of our interconnection.
Similarly, Conscious Object necklaces are conceptual drawings that are realized in three dimensions. In line with counting and prayer beads, which have existed for centuries in almost every culture, the necklaces are actual Morse code translations of text that can be read with one’s hand and worn around one’s neck. The meaning of each piece is also echoed in the choice of its material; to combine beauty and substance offers an alternative to the historically reinforced divide between the two.
Through experiences of travel, I have been able to process more extensively how my work can comment on and question the inherited stains of the past. Being outside of known structures has afforded me the space to become more open to a greater scope of things. The fundamental elements of Meaning Cleaning were literally laid out on the studio floor at a residency in Tuscany, Italy; in a cultural exchange workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, I was able to recognize my own marginal ways of thinking, and reflect on the choice to transform personal trauma into a more universal compassion against the inequalities of human justice.
I am very interested to work again in a way in an environment that has undergone its own transformation- in the case of the Headlands Center for the Arts, from military base with a destructive past to an Artists’ colony with an innovative future. I would like to examine how that environment and its history could lend itself to the themes of my work by providing a space for self-reflection, inquiry, and dedicated studio time. It would be enriching to work in such a unique location, with its torrid and transformed history, as well as its geographic specificity and beauty.