Chelsea Swan

Early in 2023 I began a project based on the relationship between (in art) fantasy, play and daydreams with relation to past trauma. I was looking at dark realities covered up by iridescence. I was working through the idea that never growing up meant never letting go and the artist tendency to let the childish out in their work in order to process the past while masking it.

I was reading Derek Jarman at the time as his work had recently been on in Manchester. A line in a poem he wrote sparked this line of thought.

“A rainbow appeared

in a sudden squall

and big fat raindrops

started to fall.

‘Oh rainbow colour

please was away

the grey of my life

the grey of my day”

Jarman, D. (2019) Chroma: A book of colour: June ’93. London: Vintage Classics.

As he wrote this so close to the end of his life it started me thinking about how imagination protects us, how we retreat into creative thought, and how the artist expresses this. I was thinking about my own use of bright colours and how I lean towards absurdism and like to play with people and hide darker things beneath this.

I often work very quickly and create lots of things as the ideas come, otherwise I would never make anything, it would all be forgotten in the ether. At this time I was creating lots off little worlds, a sort of representation of the endless daydream i seem to be in. I was thinking about the versions of ourselves we put forward and the ways that we hide the things that have hurt us.

I’m sure there was more to it but this is just a test post and that was a while ago now, like looking at a past or alternate self, I can really remember it clearly just the gist of it. We move on.