Intro: An Artist’s Journey to an MFA

I’ve always considered myself to be an artistic person. From the time I was able to hold a marker, I felt more comfortable expressing myself through doodles and drawings than through verbal communication. I’d quietly sit in the background of the world and absorb and observe the world around me.  Being born on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, I was surrounded by stunning landscapes and the beauty of an untamed world that drew me in and constantly inspired me. I was raised in a home with limited access to technology and spent a lot of time on roadtrips looking out windows or lost in some literary fantasy world. My home growing up was filled with indigenous handmade arts from throughout North and South America, collected by my parents in the life that existed before me. Even though my immediate family was welcoming and encouraging of my creativity, there were limits. By age seven I was banned from stickers and given sticky notes so I’d stop ruining the furniture and walls. Pens were confiscated and paint was put on a high shelf only to be used under strict supervision. Family and friends expressed how wonderful it was that I had a hobby, but I somehow got the message art was a good thing to explore in my free time and by the time I entered my teen years, I understood that art wasn’t something you did for your life, more something you fit in the cracks alongside your real life out in the real world. For a long time I believed that. I never considered myself a talented artist. I viewed arts through a very historically academic lens of two dimensional works, which I’ve never felt confident in pursuing. It wasn’t until my senior year of highschool when I discovered ceramics and in an instant my whole body knew this is what I’m meant to do. I changed my entire direction, applied to new schools with a new major and a new dream to work towards. 

During my undergraduate program at Humboldt State University, I wanted to absorb everything I could about art. Luckily, my determination in high school allowed me to opt out of most general education classes and instead get an intro into every medium offered. With one foot always in ceramics, I fell in love with all of it. Printmaking, painting, photography, sculpture and  textiles. It became impossible for me to be a one medium artist and instead allowed me to use techniques from a range of mediums to influence one another and talk to each other collaboratively, mostly by applying the knowledge of those mediums to my ceramics. Ceramics acted as the anchor to my self acceptance as an artist. My exploration into the medium in my undergraduate degree focused on learning functional pottery techniques. My focus was on throwing dynamic forms that ungulate similarly to a human body or a rolling landscape. To round out my pieces, I created glaze profiles that mixed the colors and feelings of the landscapes and environment I had grown up admiring. I focused wholeheartedly on becoming a functional potter who created work that would be used in everyday life and by the time I graduated I felt confident I had achieved that goal and could make a life for myself. 

It wasn’t too long after graduation that I got this feeling that I wasn’t being all I could be. I was still creating work but began to realize how much life was ahead of me and how little of my artistic voice I’d truly explored. I started to look into how I could continue my exploration and found my way to UAF. 

My work drastically shifted with the encouragement of new instructors and a new environment. I was encouraged to push my ceramics in a new direction and use new tools to tell more complicated narratives. I was so trapped in the mindset of a functional potter that I had a lot of trouble expanding my mind beyond the control of wheel throwing. I was so convinced that my path was as a functional potter I couldn’t even imagine using clay as a vehicle to make sculptures. Jim Brashear said to me one day “A wheel is just another tool in your ceramic practice. You wouldn’t build pots with just a rib or just a needle tool.” That thought really made an impression on me and jump started my journey both away and eventually back to utilizing the wheel and the idea of throwing as one step in a multiprocess practice. My first departure was still very focused on how I could use my thrown pots to create multi piece altered forms and still had a certain element of control. As I started to expand how I was using my artistic voice, my visual elements became more and more objective and direct, which caused me to flow further and further away from the wheel and deeper into handbuilding. I had never worked with my hands so consistently and I suddenly felt a new kind of regret for my years of hyperfixation on wheel throwing. I realized how much that hindered me and created a large hole in my ceramic knowledge that I now had to play catch up to fill, which created a lot of somewhat predictable disasters and mistakes. While this led to quite a few breakthroughs and a deeper understanding of the medium, it was an embarrassingly long learning curve that in a lot of ways continues through today. 

Aside from my evolution physically, my work went through many conceptual evolutions during my time in the program, starting with a desire for my work to better reflect me and the issues I care about. I was raised by an extended family that was fiercely democratic and increasingly socialist. I’ve been on picket lines and protests for as long as I can remember and knowing my parents, even before I can remember.  I myself have always been fairly vocal about my beliefs and in adulthood I suddenly “became” very political. My work as an undergraduate not only didn’t reflect that part of myself but felt like it actively avoided it. I wanted my work to be a vehicle for me to communicate those beliefs to the world. In my first few semesters, that manifested in an extremely broad approach that spanned across every intersection imaginable. 

The work of my first and second year was interesting but lacked personal connection and focused more on a global perspective. It was like I was tentatively beating around the bush because to hit it would mean I would have to open myself to the world. I was hiding behind globalism and even national politics to avoid facing myself and my lived experiences. I felt the issues that affected me were too small, not worth mentioning, even boring but it's the interconnectedness of all problems that lead to larger issues and I was forgetting the impact that small changes can make. 

Through time the statements I was making and issues I was addressing got narrower and narrower until I was sitting in my own lived experiences. My work became so personal it made me nervous. The work in this show makes me feel incredibly exposed while also being an outlet for me to let go of my embarrassment in speaking on these issues that in many ways are small or silly, but are nonetheless important and speak to larger status quos that deserve to be challenged. 

Hysterical: A Thesis Show 

Part One: Existing in a Fat Body

 This show is an exploration of my existence as a plus size queer woman growing up in American society of the 90’s and 00’s. The work can be broken into three categories; the first being a childhood filled with fatphobia and the harmful effect of youth diet culture. This work covers the longest period of time, starting as far back as second grade. In my efforts to come to terms with my relationship with my body and the food that sustains me, there were a number of key moments in my life that created a self hatred of my body that I am still unraveling today. The works included in the show highlight a few of those defining moments.

The painting Shame depicts a familiar touch. One that was present and practiced for as long as I can remember. The touch of disgust and self loathing that is all too familiar to a plus size person. There was never a time in my conscious being that I wasn’t aware of my size. I can remember being in single digit ages and nervous that my body was taking up too much space. In recent years, the journey to self acceptance has led to a new touch. One of strength and love. As the viewer, moving through the gallery space, the large paintings show that shift in perspective that evolves from Shame’s (right) starting point. I’ve confronted women my entire life who gave me back handed compliments and weird looks, who said things like “You could be so pretty if you lost weight.”,  and men who wouldn’t even look me in the eye or acknowledge my presence around skinnier friends as if talking to a plus size woman was beneath them or not worth their time. The paintings in Hysterical show a girl coming into her own voice and body despite the voices of others.   

Even with a confidence in my skin, there are people who come up to me convinced that their “concern” for me is about my health and it never fails to make me sigh. Let’s talk about  health for a minute. The piece Ode to Desserts I didn’t Eat in Public (below), is a shrine to the potlucks, team dinners, and social events I’ve attended where I actively avoided the goodies table as if announcing to the world “Look at me, I’m so healthy, I don’t even go near those bad foods” While teammates on the same varsity teams I was on would carb load on massive helpings of spaghetti and garlic bread, I would make sure I filled my plate with every kind of salad and vegetable that was offered. Still to this day I struggle to allow myself to eat a cookie in front of people, especially strangers. I remember being young enough to trick or treat but old enough to know candy made you fat so while my brother gorged himself and ate his haul in a week, I was hiding my goodies in a bottom drawer even from myself and eating it slowly and out of sight. In high school, the height of eating disorders, I would skip lunch because I couldn’t handle the voice inside my head that convinced me that everyone around me was watching me and was disgusted by me. I hid eating habits from my parents, getting home before them and eating snacks quickly before they came home so I wouldn’t eat too much at dinner. When my brother went for seconds it was “He’s a growing boy” and when I did it was “You’re having seconds?”. At the height of my own eating disorder, I convinced myself that Odwalla juices were a meal because they’re made of both fruit and vegetable juice and for a while I only ate foods that I considered “water foods”, fruits and vegetables that had high water content. I went to my first job at PAPA Murphy’s and worked through dizziness and acid reflux because I was addicted to the way emptiness felt. I started getting compliments. “You look really good this year.” “Whatever you're doing, keep doing it”. I counted calories and avoided everything from bread to sugar, fats to pasta. To this day I can tell you how many calories are in a carrot, how much fat is in a serving of nuts, and the sugar content of an apple. These are normal, natural foods that were too “unhealthy” for me to eat. Even with the constant vigilance, I was never and could never be thin. A pesky thing called genes are in the way. There is no food that is unhealthier than an eating disorder and no one knows more about what people considered a healthy diet than a fat girl who has been informed about it by everyone around her since she was prepubescent. I was willing to kill myself to be thin, not because it was actually healthier, but because I didn’t want to hear another comment about my body and being thin meant everyone would stop “being concerned with my health”. 

I was in my senior year of high school, the thinnest I’ll ever be, feeling like I finally deserved to exist, when a metric written by and created for men shattered my illusion in a doctors office. For two years I’d been complaining about pain in my feet to my parents and when it was finally brought to the attention of my doctor, she told me it was because my weight was too much for my joints and according to the BMI I should try to lose 20-30 pounds. I was 17 and had been actively trying to have an eating disorder for close to six years. I had starved myself, denied myself, and abused my body trying to earn existence and I still wasn’t good enough. A year later, X-rays revealed hereditarily deformed toe bones that would have caused pain at any weight because weight was never the issue causing the pain. -25 (right)  is a sculpture about the first time I remember my weight being an excuse and a catch-all diagnosis for any issue I was having. It hasn’t been the last and speaks to a larger issue of fatness in medicine. Obesity is used as an excuse or precursor to any number of health issues, yet there are multiple studies that disprove that mindset. Yes, weight can contribute to the severity of an issue and can impact the chance of overcoming an issue, but not always. The bigger picture is that the types of issues we attach to weight, heart disease, diabetes, etc, are hereditary and will affect you at any weight. There are even studies that state there is little to no evidence that weight loss eliminates or even lessens a person's chance of having these diseases. I’m not discrediting that weight impacts health, it just isn’t the precursor or even the cause of these issues. Health looks different from person to person. Using a patient's weight as an excuse not to look closer at an issue affecting them is fatphobic. Plus size patients routinely receive less time with doctors and are often denied diagnosis, attributing any and all issues to the person's weight. This leads to unsettling statistics about people being impacted or passing away from treatable illnesses because of preconceived notions of obesity and a lack of empathy towards fat people. Being denied a medical diagnosis because of my weight during the height of my eating disorder also speaks to the misinformation regarding who suffers from eating disorders and what they look like. My doctor wasn’t concerned about my health or she would’ve been telling me to eat solid balanced meals, instead she shamed me for my weight and essentially encouraged me to continue my unhealthy relationship with food. 

Part Two: Exploitation

The second issue I attempt to address in this show is the exploitation of feminine bodies physically, emotionally, and monetarily. My first interactions with exploitative imagery came shortly after the upper part of my body began developing. The attention I received and the changes I saw in the way people interacted with me happened almost instantaneously, especially if I found a way to highlight that part. In those moments, my weight faded to an afterthought and my chest was what defined me. I was growing up in the first wave of internet culture and female bodies were just a click away. By the time I was graduating high school, to compete with that convenience, I too had put myself on display. It was a weird dichotomy to exist in. For so long I had been convinced that I was unworthy of existence and suddenly there was almost an armor I could use to get the attention and validation that I had been denied for so long. I became an addict, craving that feeling. I reveled in the way people did double takes so I curated my personality, and wardrobe, around what I saw at the time as my only asset. This is of course untenable. There was no way to exist in an entirely curated persona. There was no way to compete with instant gratification of the internet and the overconsumption of feminine bodies that exists everywhere, not just virtually but in reality, in magazines, on billboards, in commercials and on tv my entire life. It was everywhere. Lose the waist but keep the boobs. Lose the thighs but keep the butt. The same unrealistic environment that was telling me you’ll never be enough, you'll never look like this, was sending a message to my younger self that still exists in my head today. “You may be fat but at least you have nice boobs.” That moto played on a loop during my late teens and early twenties. Millennials spend an average of just under three hours a day on social media platforms, which tend to have a higher percentage of female users. Of those female users, 90% said they edited, photoshopped, or used filters before posting images of themselves online when surveyed by University of London's Gender and Sexualities Research Centre. Young people are consuming unrealistic female bodies regularly and at alarming rates. This is even more impactful on young men, who are the minority on social media platforms essentially making it a buyers market on female bodies. My piece Consume (right) attempts to show the harmful effects of this consumption that detach the women from her “assets”, furthering a centuries long mindset that views women as objects rather than human beings with agency and autonomy.

 As the consciousness of female autonomy grows and women take on more agency, some attempt to flip objectification and exploitation to be empowering and entrepreneurial. The pieces Whore (below left) and Entrepreneurs (below right) explore the rise of women taking the reins of being in control of both their bodies and the money that can be made off them. As sites like onlyfans, which put women in the driver's seat of their own consent, grew in popularity,  new outrage over the same misogyny has developed. For decades the sexual exploitation of women on sites like Porn Hub and in publications like Playboy have been tolerated and for the most part accepted by society, even celebrated, but as women take control of their own bodies and more importantly their monetization, suddenly “the world’s oldest profession” is unacceptable and an insult to men who have become so accustomed to having women at their fingertips. “How dare women consent to what we set up as exploitation! How dare they make money off of a dependency men created!” This relationship has led to a rise in revenge porn style “outing” of women who use the site, where men, being denied one form of exploitation, created a new type of invasion of privacy and in many ways, a new form of sexual assault, so “acceptable” that a newspaper in Philidephia was able to print photographs of a candidate running for congress that had been stolen off her onlyfans website just this year. Thankfully they were not nude, but the leak speaks to a larger issue in society.

Most people don’t ask the question why women who are nurses, teachers, grocers, and senate candidates would need to turn to sex work as supplemental income, rather they focus on the narrative that these women are whores, ignoring the fact that there are more than one way women are exploited in today’s society. I’d like to skip over, while keeping in mind, the most obvious and ever present wealth gap that still exists in this country and is addressed in my piece Trickling through the Gaps , to talk about where both monetary exploitation and medical exploitation intersect. 

There are more obvious and life threatening ways medical exploitation can occur, as we are currently watching the obliteration of female autonomy and agency happen on a national and global scale, but access to sanitary products affects every person with a uterus and is worth discussing. My pieces Luxury and Tax (below) attempt to start the conversation about where femanine, monetary, and medical exploitation convergence starts for most women. People with uteruses, on average, menstruate every four to six weeks for 40 years. A period lasts 5-7 days and in that time an average of 20 menstrual products are used and each month, women are taxed. In the U.S. there are currently 30 states that still implement some type of tax on menstrual products. The taxes range from 4-6% and label menstrual products luxury items. Every year those taxes cost women 150 million dollars. Menstruating is a natural body occurrence and is experienced 450-500 times in the course of one’s life, yet the cost of these products make them out of reach for many people. Harvard Medical School published a report that stated 64% of women have difficulty paying for these products and 21% couldn’t afford them every month. Women below the poverty line, who are homeless, or are incarcerated are most impacted by the cost of products and government assistance like food stamps and WIC, don’t allow for the purchase of menstrual products. This leads to people using other materials or trying to prolong the use of their products by using them for longer than recommended. This in turn, creates new medical problems like yeast infections or more life threatening toxic shock syndrome. These products are necessities and should be treated as such, not taxed as a luxury. 

Part Three: Violence and Protection

The third category explores how the above examples of exploitation lead to violence and how ideas of women as objects translate to how we deal with and talk about violence. There’s an ongoing theme in conversations about violence that removes the perpetrator from the equation. It’s always a conversation about violence against women, putting women in the center of their own abuse, making it seem like women are the problem in these situations. As if violence just descends on them from an unknown source. It is men who cause this violence in staggering percentages, and by separating them from the conversations, society can uphold patriarchy at every step of journey toward accountability and justice, while creating a culture of fear and shame in women. As a woman who has experienced violence in a number of ways, I find this framing frustrating to say the least. My work that falls into this category takes on a more satirical tone. It didn’t start that way, but talking about this subject in particular is incredibly dark and retraumatizing for myself and others, yet violence against women is an extremely common occurrence. According to The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 4 women experience violence in their life time, 1 in 5 are raped and 1 in 3 experience this violence at the hands of an intimate partner. These real experiences are horrifying and incredibly traumatizing, yet somehow are a common plot line in our entertainment, most of which depict a glamorized or sexualized view of violence, while the impact and trauma of the victim is often minimized or non-existent.  In an effort to not contribute to that standard, I tried to focus and call out the hypocrisy of phrases like violence against women. In the piece Femme Fatale (above), I explored the idea of what it means to constantly be prepared to fend off an attacker. It’s composed of weapons that had been in ads targeted to me because an algorithm recognised I was a female within a certain age range. Some of the weapons are designed just for protection and provention but some are lethal and I am terrified and angry that as a society we’ve reached a point where, instead of dealing with what causes “violence against women”, we as women need to be prepared to straight up kill someone at any moment in the name of protection. The triptych Dead Men Don’t (left) with accompanying digital ads,  looks at what the conclusion of that mindset might mean. I imagined a company that provided everything one might need to “escape” a violent partner. They would sell products in an infomercial style to provide discreet solutions to dispose of and clean up an abusive situation. This piece is the last work the viewer is confronted with. It is an homage to feminine rage and sums up the internal anger I started to feel when I started examining all the ways gender was used to limit my life. It reinforces the title of the show Hysterical, a word created to write off anger, frustration, sadness, even joy, by satirically asking “You want to see hysterical?”. 

Part Four: Color and Material

Aside from the work being linked together as my experiences, they are also linked through color and material. The majority of the show stays within a very binary color scheme. I used color to both call out the gender binary that leads to these issues and to clearly communicate how that binary impacts these issues to the viewer.  By using a blue/pink color scheme, I was able to explore these concepts and experiences of gender in a way that is understandable by the audience and helps to reinforce the concepts of the pieces themselves. The piece Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice (right) explores how women have to have control over their emotions out of safety and how some emotions (spice), though valid, label women as unpleasant, difficult, bitches. This concept is shown through the spice bottles being pink and holding only sweet and mild ingredients, being contained on a blue spice rack reinforced that these “spices” are the only ones accepted within patriarchy and the rest should be disregarded. In combination with color, material plays a role in a number of sculptures in the show. While all the pieces utilize ceramic as their main medium, works like Fragile Egos (below left) use fabric to help tell the story. This work represents the way rape is dealt with in far too many cases. They ask the viewer “What is the cost of a woman?”. It was inspired by statistics of untested rape kits, the number of women who don’t feel safe to report their assults, and the lack of accountability perpetrators receive in the american court systems. By placing a gentle or shy looking penis in a soft pink environment, the piece shows how coddling and protective society is to men at the cost of women because “He has a bright future ahead”, “He shouldn’t pay with his life for five minutes of poor judgment”, “A conviction like this could ruin his life”. Fabric helps to drive home the innocence of women in these situations and the delicate nature of this issue. 

Acknowledgements  

This show explores my experience of existence that has repeatedly been met with resistance. It is influenced by a society that imposed a reality that actively rejects my existence for a number of reasons, most notably being a woman. The work draws on my knowledge of intersectional feminist and queer theory that I absorbed through books like Girlhood by Melissa Febos. It’s influenced by conceptual performance artists like Maria Abromovich, as well as feminist artists of the 1970’s, most notably the Gorrilla Girls. Lastly, my work is not only inspired by, but is also an ode to all the women who raised me, across generations. Those women who taught me how to use my hands, who imparted generational knowledge into my craft and introduced me to the beauty and skill of “women’s work”. This show is for those women who taught me how to love myself and my body after their deaths and who encourage me from behind the veil. 

Works Cited:

Gill, Rosalind, and City University London. “90% Of Young Women Report Using a Filter or Editing Their Photos before Posting.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 8 Mar. 2021, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210308111852.htm.

Beddows, Amy. “Representation Matters - Women and Violence on Screen.” Rape Crisis South London, 13 Feb. 2019, https://www.rasasc.org.uk/representation-matters-women-and-violence-on-screen/.

“Disordered Eating & Dieting.” NEDC, Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, 19 July 2022, https://nedc.com.au/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-explained/disordered-eating-and-dieting/.

Farid, Huma. “Period Equity: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Harvard Health, The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1 June 2021, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/period-equity-what-is-it-why-does-it-matter-202106012473.

Loofbourow, Lili. “Why Society Goes Easy on Rapists.” Slate Magazine, The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company., 30 May 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/sexual-assault-rape-sympathy-no-prison.html.

Montgomery, Amanda. “School of Public Health.” Addressing Weight Stigma and Fatphobia in Public Health, School of Public Health/University of Illinois Chicago, https://publichealth.uic.edu/community-engagement/collaboratory-for-health-justice/addressing-weight-stigma-and-fatphobia-in-public-health/.

“NCADV: National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.” The Nation's Leading Grassroots Voice on Domestic Violence, NATIONAL DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOTLINE, 2020, https://ncadv.org/STATISTICS.

Oakes, Kelly. “The Complicated Truth about Social Media and Body Image.” The Complicated Truth about Social Media and Body Image , BBC, 11 Mar. 2019, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190311-how-social-media-affects-body-image.

OASH. “Your Menstrual Cycle.” Your Menstrual Cycle , Office on Women’s Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1 Feb. 2022, https://www.womenshealth.gov/menstrual-cycle/your-menstrual-cycle#:~:text=How%20long%20does%20a%20woman,40%20years%20of%20their%20life.&text=Most%20women%20have%20regular%20periods,begins%20the%20change%20to%20menopause.

Perrett, Connor. “Alexandra Hunt Is on Onlyfans and Running for Congress.” Business Insider, Insider Inc., 3 May 2022, https://www.businessinsider.com/alexandra-hunt-onlyfans-running-for-congress-2022-5.

Williamson, Francie. “Department of Psychiatry.” What Is the Most Common Eating Disorder? The Answer May Surprise You | Department of Psychiatry, University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, 13 Feb. 2020, https://medicine.uiowa.edu/psychiatry/content/what-most-common-eating-disorder-answer-may-surprise-you.