Preview
Creation Date
2021
Description
Materials: Plaster Wraps, Wax, Wasp Nests, Oyster Mushroom
Dimensions: Dimensions vary
Project Advisor: Rob Neilson
Year of Graduation: 2021
Medium
Sculpture
Medium
Installation
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
COinS
Artist Statement
I’m not quite sure how to start this as I find talking about myself incredibly difficult. My mind goes blank when confronted with the idea of being perceived by anyone and subjected to potential ridicule after being vulnerable with others. It is hard for me to find the beauty in myself and like what I do, the only thing that makes me like me is making art. It was how I started to change the way I viewed myself. I have always been obsessed with figural work; I developed a style and my own way of looking at people after seeing how expressive bodies can be. This gave me the freedom I needed to critically think about how people view anatomy in our society, myself included.
Despite the positive impact art has made on my understanding of beauty and aesthetics, I still constantly struggle with body dysmorphia and my sense of self-worth. I use plaster, wax, metal, and sometimes wood to portray these feelings. For these sculptures, I focused on plaster and wax to replicate and emphasize how fleshy and grotesque my form can be to me. My mind distorts how I see myself to the point where it can be painful to even look in a mirror, but seeing the physical shells of my body wasn’t painful. It helped me have a true concept of what my body looks like.
This process has been therapeutic for me. The act of creating these pieces required me to be exposed and vulnerable with a few people who helped me, posing almost nude and immobile for forty minutes at a time helped me to be more comfortable with my body being viewed by others. Another act of therapy for me during this series of sculptures was how the process of finishing them forced me to put myself back together again, be gentle and precious with myself, and interact with my form in an intimate way. My art is my therapy and it helps me in ways that no one else can. There is something oddly personal about plaster casting your own body. As the months went on and I worked more and more on my figures I started to see myself differently, until by the end of the process I had a new concept of my body.