Thesis Artist Statement

My involvement in community workshops utilizing the interdisciplinary arts as a method of healing has shaped my view on what is art and how it affects those who perceive it. Through my experiences I have become acutely aware of the nuances of our individual realities, how our thoughts unconsciously create the tangible worlds we live in, and the interactions between those realities. It is the reaction of multiple perceptions that I have attempted to visually illustrate as my senior project.

I conducted an investigation, break down and reconstruction of the image women conceive for themselves, focusing on women’s body issues, visually breaking down skewed self-perceptions and transforming them into subtle expressions of truth and beauty. I chose the female body and the space she inhabits as a channel to concentrate the broad scope that the self-perceived world could encompass. Body image lends itself to a variety of differing perspectives; how one sees one’s self is most often askew to the view of another. By subjecting women’s harsh, distorted, and critical self-image to such an inaccurate construct, a threshold is created where truth, clarity and her inherent perfection is granted emergence from the depths of obscurity. Through the physical medium of oil, I created a visual collision of multiple perceptions, a reaction between the relationship of the subject’s self-image, and my artistic perception as an observer of the world in shapes, color, and form as well as one who penetrates beyond the boundaries of sight, unearthing human obscurities as aesthetic beauty.