Chelsea Swan

If you are what you create and what you create expresses you then the below list should probably explain some of the things I do at least. So the things that excite, inspire and make me in no particular order;

• Nature, as it relaxes me, calming my thoughts and focusing me on noticing the details, changing of the seasons, the different light and shadows through the year. I work through my thoughts and sound things out better when walking.
• Music, I love to dance and feel free in my body, to feel my body moving and the privalage of that. I like dramatic music, heightened intense emotion that makes me feel something, heightens my mood or distracts me. I love the communal feeling of gigs. I will dance anywhere to a good song and I am not a snob about what makes good music. I miss mix tapes and still make playlist as if they were a mix tape. I buy cds so I can listen to the album in its intended order, like a story.
• Books, I love to learn new things, I have always loved learning. I love to see new perspectives, be surprised, and most of all, to see myself in a story and feel like I have been seen, that I am known in return. I have become so much more biased to female authors and feel little enjoyment in male perspectives. That is not to say that I do not love Shakespeare or that some of my favourite books are not by men, but that my tolerance for wading through the vapid hordes has diminished and much of the women written by men are just too far from any woman’s experience. I have lost faith in mens ability to encoumpas all of human nature. You sometimes wonder if they have ever met a woman. I am also lucky enough to always be finding new female authors who excite me and I have an endless list of books to read. Our history is short but we are prolific. Women writers have to voice everything for every woman who wan not allowed a voice. I also love to read about artists, art history, essays on art, philosophy, science, and nature.
• Control, although not always positive control is a thing that makes me and alters how I behave. I control my eating, my step count, I can be a perfectionist in my work and combat this by working very quickly. I always want to control situations and interactions. I want to be seen as good. I want to control peoples emotional states. I want everyone to always be happy so I don’t feel bad. In the past I would change my work or myself to be seen as good.
• ADHD, I need constant input and buzz and excitement of increasing intensity. I need change. I start projects on a daily basis. I will never finish most of what I start. My mind goes at a mile a minuet, everything is connected. There is no difference to me in all the subjects I talk about. They are all the same thing. I have endless joy and excitement. I am extremely passionate. I am too much. I am too outspoken, too political, too feminist, too weird. I do not try to dull myself. I will go through periods of constantly making and periods of not making anything but I am always doing, always thinking. I get distracted but I also explore more, make more interesting work, more interesting connections, feel more and put that passion and intensity into my work. There is instability but I gain more from the chaos than living a structured life.
• Being a Woman. There is no escaping my gender and all the consequences that go with it but I have never wanted to be a man. My femininity gives me great joy. It broke me to find that it was something society thought I should be ashamed of. I love my mind, the multitudes that exist within women, the joy and connection and creativity. When you say you are a feminist people think that you want women to gain something that men have, but most of us also see that men are really missing out by suppressing and denying what society has defined as feminine and therefore shameful. I have never felt this more than when I have been in communaly feminine spaces and felt the connection and vibrancy witch women share. The male life in comparison seems dull and lonely to me. I say this not to be unkind but to say that the system lost them too, we were both held back from full actualisation.
• Sex, as separate to my gender. I love my body and how it feels and existing within it. I feel that the body is the thing women are most judged on and told to hide. The visibility, variety and freedom with which we can express ourselves within our bodies is what will free us, no longer an object of the ‘male gaze’. The magazines, media, art, and speech, aimed at me as a young girl made me hate what I saw in the mirror and that is still there, that voice in my head. It is toxic feminism to claim you should suddenly not care how you look because you are a feminist. Cindy Sherman taught me I can use this body, these social expectations, to play a part. I can dress up as a new me. I play dress up every day. It is both fun and exhausting.
• Weird people. They are rare but I love meeting, reading, seeing art by, watching films by, and listening to music by unconventional people. I don’t mean whacky. I think anyone with the bravery to really create, heart and soul, is pretty weird these days. There is a conspiracy everyone seems complicit in to kill off individualism and creativity and intellectualism. If you have thrown this off you are pretty odd. If you have created from the soul and laid it all bear you are a compleat and utter weirdo. My teacher used to say “don’t be interesting be interested” I really don’t think society wants us to be interested. I think that we would vote differently, buy differently, be passionate. That’s not good for our little consumer capitalist way of life. The world is burning and we are making more mini consumers and getting wrapt up in buzz topics and watching television. They wrap us up in beliefs that difference is bad.
• Play, fantasy, daydreaming, messing with peoples world views. I fully buy into absurdism. While I am not able to complete throw out societal constructs like working and paying my bills etc, I am aware it is all stupid. I have never quite been able to keep a straight face, to see the serious importance of whatever it is. I just don’t think its real, any of it. I think we all need breaking out of our bubble sometimes. Everything around us is made up, the institutions, ideology’s, behavioural expectations, gender. They made it up and I am supposed to play along. You wont drag me down. I wont be wasting my life, not a second. I am gonna go. I’m gonna be wired and inappropriate. I am gonna run away from dullness and play whenever I can. I have seen the system consume. The seriousness can destroy you.
• Connections, I love seeing how one thing relates to another, and I love that I often connect ideas in ways that others don’t, and that’s what make my perspective my own, that what is in my work that is not in the work of others. I am not saying I am better. I am saying we all do this, but what brings me joy is when I do it. Like solving a mathimatical equation. My work is me trying to figure it out, to see if others can see the connections. I love when my mind is alive with it all and I can go off on infinite tangents.