Tamara Garvey

Artist Statement

In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate J.D. Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."

"It's just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"

Last summer, I randomly came upon an online essay called “Ode to the Log Lady” by Basje Boer, with the following header:

“A cross between a village idiot and an oracle, the Twin Peaks character cradling a piece of wood invites us to look beyond clichés of womanhood.”

To be honest, I had never been a diehard Twin Peaks fan. But I love absurdism, so the whimsical Log Lady has stayed with me ever since my one viewing of the show.

If you’re not familiar with her: she is a middle-aged woman, childless, a widow. She always carries a small log in her arms, with which she claims to communicate psychically. She listens to her log and then passes along advice and general visions of clairvoyance…from her log.

As Boer’s essay states: “The Log Lady is strange but not pitiful. She is childless yet feisty, old but interesting. She is a witch, but not one to fear. She is a witch who commands respect.”

It occurred to me that the Log Lady was a perfect symbol for how women in our society are shunted to the side and overlooked as we age, particularly if we don’t have children. J.D. Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” statements had never really left public discourse (at some point even Taylor Swift had been painted with that idiotic brush), and I decided to combine these two concepts.

I issued a public call through my social media, inviting women and people AFAB from all over the U.S. to submit their thoughts and feelings - in the form of a voicemail or a text/email - on Vance’s words.

I received submissions from 53 people across 16 states (and 2 foreign countries)!

I combined peoples’ actual voices (or mine reading their written words) into a 1.5 hour-long continuous sound file. Please take a moment to listen to some of their words: all you have to do is put on the headphones and “listen to the log.”

The women’s voices provide a backdrop for my 16 Log Lady-inspired paintings, which I completed between July 2025 and January 2026. They feature a gamut of symbolism, including witchery, Woody Guthrie's phrase "This machine kills fascists,” suffragism, Ruth Bader Ginsberg's iconic collars, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and handwritten snippets of the actual submissions I received.