Chelsea Swan

So I had a bunch of photos from some idea I had about goddess embroidery pieces that I quickly got board of and moved on from (SEE EARLIER POSTS) but I still wanted to do something with the images so I thought I could make them into little experiments for what I wanted to do for the Interim exhibition.

I am leaning more and more into the idea of diary’s and visual note keeping and the codes we create to express ourselves in diarys. For me this means using the codes and visual note taking I have always used as my own form of diary. Writing has always felt performative to me and I have more often used doodles and sketches and making things as a way of expressing what is on my mind and what is happening in my life at that point. For the interim exhibition I want to take the ideas from the lampshades, which are an amalgam of everything I have been thinking about recently, and my views of the state of being a woman, of being myself, and combine them to create a piece that expresses some of this as a sort of diaristic tableau. I think a lot of this process has been about being brave and leaning into the things I do naturally, the things that come most instinctively. Letting them come out more and more and trying to worry less about them, the ideas, reasoning, parts of myself, the drawings, being stupid. I think growing up as a woman a lot of what you do is seen as silly or frivolous or stupid, being girly is related to childishness. A thing being associated with being a woman means it is put down and mocked. I am trying to push through this and my fear of opening up and my fear of rejection and my desire for legitimacy and to pull myself back to a self before I started trying to be good in the eyes of others. I understand why feminist artist fought to reclaim mediums such as painting to lend legitimacy to their ideas, or why they forged forward with performance art as a new medium to establish it as their own, but I want to take the third route of using that which has always been part of me and has always come naturally to me, to draw, to diary my experience, to use feminine pursuits passed down to me by the women in my family, as they are part of me now and most naturally express the things I want to say.

So anyway, what i am saying is I have tried to make these drawings as a diaristic form of note taking on the thoughts and feelings I have had around the complicated subject of my body as a female body that is also a broken body. That I should love it and I should hate it and that if i do love it im a narcissist and the innate sin in the female body. It is hard to pinpoint how I feel about it when I grew up with anorexia being the aim and the media telling you to hate yourself thin and now the media says love yourself with our product and social media women say love yourself no matter what, and men say if you love yourself you are a joke. And I use my body in my work, and it is just a symbol at that point, and I love all bodies, but I did have an eating disorder and that was not about athletics in any way, and now I have arthritis and a lot of problems probably steaming from the eating disorder. And it all does come down to athletics and not the functionality of the body. And we should love our bodies just for functioning as well as they can but even then I will starve myself to feel safe an worthy and break it more. Basically I don’t know. It’s all outward appearance of looking goo to be then called a narcissist for loving myself based off the assumption that I do love myself when I dont and I am broken, but I also don’t have myself. I dont have the answer but I have some drawings that mock the idea that I think I am a goddess.

Moving on – this first set, aesthetically, are not my favorite. I have tested a whole bunch of things for these drawings, papers, colours, inks, shapes, the pinkest pink paint, tiffany blue, collage, gems, watercolor, glitter sheets, sticky strips, letter stickers, and foils, as well as looking at how the combine. I think in this set I just dont think there is enough contrast / definition or that they are too soft, not enough impact.

This second set are the ones I love. I think the paper plays a big big part in what works and what does not. I like the pink paper best and probably would lean towards the second shade if it was not for the fact that it curls up with the watercolour paint. I also love the acrylic pull papers but time is an issue and also money. I dont have the money to buy a whole bunch of paper and I also don’t have the time to make a whole bunch of them as more often than not they do not look great. If not for these two factors I may have gone ahead with those backgrounds.

This is what inspired the idea of me wanting to do a long piece like a scroll or a tableau type thing. Lining them up together I could see how I could express many ideas in one.