Each of Gaynes’ illustrations stems from the eye of an anthropologist and the angle of a storyteller. Using surrealist word-image compositions, she attempts to make the familiar strange by bringing latent aspects of everyday life to the fore. As an oral-historian with experience in five continents (especially South-East Asia), Gaynes validates her narrators’ spiritual experiences through collage illustrations that materialize fixations of the imagination. 

 

Her diverse body of work, always dissecting culturally-specific aspects of the “sacred,” conjures far away landscapes and textures the lives of real people: healers, farmers, weavers, educators, religious practitioners, activists and educators. The figures in her illustrations play with Western logic, reminding us not to discount visceral aspects of the human experience.  

 

Gaynes’ “confessional” illustrations reveal her vulnerability as an anthropologist who, despite best attempts at adapting wherever she goes, ultimately fails to belong anywhere. Her illustrations reveal her challenges to capture the complexity of cultural narratives including her own. The raw content of her confessional work dismantles the mask of the “objective” anthropologist in order to reveal her as she really is: a vulnerable visitor grappling with whatever concrete materials she has on hand. Her personal work amplifies aspects of living a curiosity-driven life fielding both the beautiful and the grotesque.