Chelsea Swan

A body is a body nude or clothed but the nude speaks of honesty. Nude rather than naked. Nude is honesty, naked is sexualised.  I own my naked body. When I think of why I started to use my body I think I wanted to take ownership of my narrative, my experience, honesty, to lay bare, but also, I’m aware of sexuality, and reject that I am a sex object. It takes my body from being unspoken and unspeakable to becoming reality, it is spoken it is speakable, it is mine is not shameful, it is my experience, I am not just my mind I am a totality. I refuse to be divided. I refuse to prioritise either body or mind. I am not lost in the personal, in my own problems, to the exclusion of anyone else. The domestic and the public are one within my body, the world affects my body, and my body affects the world. It seems to me that much of this judgement and much of this questioning works to stop female artists from doing, from allowing themselves to be free to just do and just make and not worry about whether it is good, or worthy, or narcissistic, or self-involved, or against what others would want. I remember being at college and being told that to use the body would be a sexual act and therefore it would be cliche for a teenager to think that they were the first to discover sexuality. This was not what I was doing, however, taken from an authority figure, I believed myself then to have been doing that very thing, and stopped my work. There is bravery in the female artists who are willing to do and fail and do and fail and keep doing and keep failing and to be unwanted unloved, to be judged and criticised, and to keep going. I was not brave enough. I do not judge myself for that. I understand every girl who chooses not to fight because we don’t even know that it is a fight, we are so conditioned to listen to others that we do not even know that there is an option not to, that there is a choice involved. It is so easy to believe that you self-censor when you you choose to omit something from your work when in reality it is not a self-censorship when who you have been trained in who to be, in what to censor and what not to censor, in a way that it becomes inate. I know myself what is right and what is wrong to put in my work. I would not use somebody else’s suffering for example in my work, however, when I censor my own body, I am not doing that out of immorality or an idea of what is right and wrong, I’m doing it out of a sense of what society believes to be right and wrong, what men believed to be right and wrong, what my mother would judge to be right and wrong. That is the angel in the house. This is who Virginia Woolf killed but that body bit, that is where she dared not go still. To turn that outward and create work from that I then need to not only allow myself to create the work that I would censor to push myself to do so but to create the work that it would never even have occurred to me to have made to move beyond the censorship and into the realm beyond that, into the void that I’ve never even considered existing within. I will speak with words I do not have yet and I will say things that I do not yet know I need to say. I see the creation of artwork as a cathartic act. I’ve worked through my past I’ve worked through my fears. I do not feel done with that yet, but close to starting, I’ve worked through my pain, I’ve worked with my experiences, I put it all down, I make it all into images, and I release it in the hope that one day I will get to a point where I can move beyond that and start to make work that is honest. It may take a lifetime. I may never achieve it.