Artist Statement(s)
Evolution of Work and Self
It’s been easy for me to identify too closely with my work. Spending every day in the ceramics studio in my early twenties, I would become beautiful if my teapot had graceful lines and equally smart if the spout poured elegantly. And the work itself? Perhaps its porcelaneous beauty would enhance a dinner party. I wanted to make work that people liked. I wanted people to like me. I wanted people to be at my table. The studio was somewhere I felt valuable.
After college I pursued an apprenticeship, seeking perfection. I was warned that this master potter was a “hard-ass” by several people but I thought that was what I needed. I was not expecting this personality type and behavior to so deeply affect my sense of self. While I was there, I believed so deeply that I was a failure. Worthless. The wreckage of my mind and body was perfectly glazed over and vitrified, hardened into collectible and consumable crystals and indulgences that I sold for love and money.
On leaving, I felt like a beautifully clear path had lit up in front of me and I had shut my eyes and driven my car off the side of a cliff before even finding the start. The lack of external validation had taken me by the throat and shown me that my entire sense of self was based on waiting with baited breath for a “good girl” and a pat on the head from anyone who would give it.
When I left my apprenticeship I started painting. Then I left instagram. I started to recover from a storm of grief that I had not allowed myself to understand. I experienced even more grief. I welcomed it to the party. I untangled its twisted threads and knitted them into a sweater and ruined it in the wash and started all over.
My work has changed as I’ve moved through temporary spaces, adapting to available materials. In my home studio I’m mostly able to make panel paintings. Every piece centers around patience, growth, and finding worthiness and validation from within.
Where did your Instagram go?
An expanded statement about social media, body dysmorphia, and SA.
There was an article, or several articles, that came out a few years ago about a marked correlation between misery and social media usage in teenage girls. I thought, wow that’s so sad for them, and then looked from my own baby face in the mirror back down at the decade old Instagram account in my hand. Despite the bevy of older men in my young life assuring me that I was in fact an “old soul,” I did grow up online. Middle school memories center around IMs and MySpace. Learning some light HTML code so that my page really represented me, or else sharing my password with my cooler friend and reaping the benefits.
Self-consciousness rebounds between me, myself, my phone camera, my mirror, my instagram feed, and back to me. I post a photo of my work with a long caption about studio maintenance. I post a photo of my bruised leg and a photo of my breakfast to a special photography story. I must keep reaching out for love and attention. As an artist I must post every day for engagement. Who is a successful artist? Someone with a lot of instagram followers? How many? Someone with a lot of money? How much? Can I quantify love? Likes? The more followers I have, the more likely I am to be successful. To be noticed and chosen by the algorithm. To be elevated, to become a voice that matters and has a chance at making a proper living. The more I engage with the platform, the more likely I am to achieve the American Dream.
I was sitting in my high school art room during my junior year when I first decided to create the Instagram account. It was 2012. I had just gotten my first iPhone and I uploaded a photo of my friend holding a head of romanesco. Valencia filter, no border, thank you.
As a teenager I was becoming hyper aware of myself and my place in my friend groups. I felt like there was something deeply wrong with me because I could never find a footing, like I had always just missed an opportunity to become fully in-group. I was always running to catch a bus that had just departed, full of bikini-babes off to celebrate life and bask in the sun. I slunk home. You must fit perfectly through this hot-girl shaped hole, the sign says, and I bonk my head hard against the doorframe.
Photo albums posted to facebook showed me exactly which parties I was not invited to and group photos showed me when everyone was at the beach in the summer while I was anxiously scrolling the feeds, waiting for something. Waiting for what, I don’t know. Maybe a me-shaped void in the world. It was the feeling of finding out that all of your friends have a group chat without you, over and over again. My young body was addicted to the bright colors and chaos of that feeling, zooming in and seeing who exactly made the cut. I felt like I was dripping with something wretched, like I deserved to watch the beautiful people play from another planet. I am too big, too loud, too much of a dyke, too much.
I was born in 1995. I spent many childhood afternoons wistfully flipping through the pages of grocery store tabloids, asking myself: Who Wore it Best? I would cover the “correct answer” with my finger and make my own judgment before revealing the drastic percentage differential. My mom was born in 1960. Her mom was born in the 30s. I consider their tabloids, their versions of the hot-girl shaped door that is impossible to pass through un-concussed. I consider the ways we speak to each other and I vow to break the cycle.
It’s embarrassing to admit that my first extreme crash diet was partially-manufactured by Jillian Michaels. It was the same year I made my instagram account. I had been seriously dieting since age twelve, but now I was like Yolanda Hadid eating a cereal bowl of supplements for breakfast and just a nap for dinner. I chewed my almonds really well. I would go on to intermittently starve myself and cut out different food groups for long periods of time in hopes of finding happiness. I genuinely thought that cutting out wheat would help me to find love. My mind was sick because my body was sick because of gluten! And refined sugars! I would be beautiful. And this type of sickly beauty, this fitting through the door, granted me more algorithmic love than I had ever received from my art alone. I stopped eating regularly and the followers came. The comments boosted my posts and I started selling more work.
What is a successful artist?
Someone beautiful?
What is beauty?
My mom sent me chocolate in the mail and I flushed it down the toilet before crying myself to a zzzquil induced sleep and waking up with a headache. I would force myself to become one of the people who belonged in the photos. I would be at the beach. My phone camera filled up with images of my distorted body in the mirror. I hunched to breathe out all the way and stood up straight and snapped a shot. I checked every day to make sure I felt my hip bones and collarbones in the way I wanted. I couldn’t look away from myself and I couldn’t look at myself.
The depression swung wildly between grandiosity and self loathing. How did nobody understand that I was perfect? I post again and wait for the love that I cannot give myself. Why was I even alive when I was so disgusting? Why couldn’t I scrub hard enough to ever get clean? Will people still want my work even if and when I turn grey and ugly? Will people listen to what I have to say, ever, because I have shared so much of myself?
I was diagnosed with my eating disorder in 2018. Over time I sought recovery and gained a sense of friendship with my body that I had never known even as a little kid. My body and I became friends through a mutual love of pasta and garlic and herbs and fish and dirt and mud and water and vinegar and honey.
When I met my wife in 2020 I realized that I had been holding onto that same scroll of Instagram photos for a decade. The romanesco was still there, the remnants of a childhood, a sea of pain and pleasure and swings between hedonism and deprivation. The celebration of sacrifice and fear of the return to a resting state with round belly and red face.
But I am an artist, I said. I need it. I need to hold on to this. I have amassed thousands of viewers and followers and the people, they love me. They love me more than I will ever love myself. They buy my work and message me and comment on my posts and they tell me I’m living the American Dream. I must have this platform to prove that I am a person. To maintain the facade, to show myself that I fit through the door.
When you are still a child and you begin to compare yourself constantly to the rapid scroll of bodies and experiences online it can bury you even further from a real sense of self. I found myself projecting an image of who I wanted to be and the irony of the photo album was that I became jealous of even that person that I saw on my own feed. The Virtual-Greta whose arms didn’t move and who lived in a slight sepia filter. The person who existed yesterday, in that body, in that friend group, before this or that happened.
There are so many ways that your phone hates you when you have an eating disorder. The algorithm on your photos app, for instance, will categorize your image into several different people. The baseline/ neutral version, the flushed pink version and the grey, sleepy, thin haired one. It will sometimes ask you to name them so it can better separate them and build walls between them, showing you a photo from several years ago and asking “who is this person?” As if to say, “was this really you? Who are you, really?”
The ghosts of friends who have disappeared into clouds of miserable smoke haunt the recesses of the feeds. You are scrolling through your friends’ posts and the person who sexually assaulted you pops up on your phone screen like he’s in the room with you. Suddenly your ears are boxed by your phone’s freaky little hands. You may spend the rest of your day trying to wrench your jaw off the floor while the rest of the world spins on. The world you have created is simply metaphysical. Now that all of your emotional validation comes from this place, what do you do when the algorithm prefers the predator? Can you look up and see the real world? It all starts to slip. What happens when your body becomes healthy again and the comments dry up? Dissonance, internal screaming and pulling apart, before finally walking back through the door I came in through.
In (what must have been) 2022 I finally deleted my instagram account. My Art School’s alumni page states that I should maintain a social media presence, but Instagram made me want for everything that I did not have. The yo-yo of small and large scale trauma that is whipped around the space is hard to recover from. Here are photos from the war as it inches closer. Here is a photo of your childhood friend who passed away, posted by someone who loves you. Here is a photo of the man who kicked your dog in the head and grabbed you hard on the back of your neck as a child, posted by someone who loves you. Here is a photo of a flower, a latte, a sunset, some grainy concert footage. Here is why you’re wrong about this: an infographic. Here is someone you haven’t spoken to in years. Here is your sister in a funny hat. Here is a chart of Covid deaths.
When you choose to leave the metaphysical and return to the earth, there is healing that needs to happen. It hurt, the first year I went without Facebook: nobody said happy birthday to me unless they knew me really well. I was 19 and it felt sad to go without the dopamine rush of HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!1!11!!! messages. The same thing happens without instagram as an artist. I created a painting and didn’t show anyone. For a moment I couldn’t tell if it mattered because there was nobody there to validate me and I did not have that power within myself. None of my “followers” are following me anymore. I look behind me and there are a few cats who I need to feed. I insist on creating a world where I can be an artist independent of social media even if it means I am sometimes just looking at myself in the mirror. Other times I am petting a cat or looking into my wife’s eyes. I have learned to love women and not to fear the image of women that capitalism threatens me with. To celebrate the physical rather than to fear the fantastical, the imagined perfection.