I can finally say that I was born an artist. It has taken me many years to come to terms with who I am. I have no credentials and minimal art education. I am self-taught out of necessity. I have had five exhibitions.
I have created objects since my childhood, images which reside in my psyche to this day: The man stitched in yarn when I was 5, a hot pink furry flamingo on black satin made in 3rd grade, the carefully carved cell complete with mitochondria in 6th grade. I knitted, crocheted, and sewed doll clothes. Classes taken for “practical” purposes in high school, photography, woodshop, and textiles, I thrived in. But it never occurred to me to pursue what I loved to do.
How could I be so oblivious to the irrepressible urge of my creativity? We are so often blind to the role of class. My working class parents, raised in poverty during the Great Depression, valued a constructive job above all else. Bills had to be paid, mouths fed. Work.
Through my own hard-earned efforts, I became an exchange student to the Netherlands. A new world unfolded before my eyes. The visual landscape and architecture of Holland could not be more different than California. I was enthralled with tulips, windmills, cobblestone streets, and the warm handshakes. I fell in love with the Flemish masters: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Escher, Jan Steen, Franz Halls, Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch, Mondrian, Jan Van Eyck and Vermeer. The year flew by as I immersed myself in Dutch culture.
But art had no place once I got back home. Just getting a college education was considered a privilege. Of course you had to be practical. As I received my diploma, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, I knew with a sinking heart that something had gone wrong. My career goal had not taken into account my passion or the sensitive nature of my brain and body. Being a hospice nurse for a year took its toll. I injured my back and became bedridden.
Out of sheer boredom I began to "make things." Magazine clippings became collages. Fabric strips were woven into baskets. My long lost muse emerged after a deep sleep, shaking off the conditioning that had stultified her. An eggshell eventually became the face of a cotton-mache woman. One hand outstretched, the other a fist pulling away. I named her "She Who Gives and Takes.”
Unfortunately, my health problems plunged to a deeper systemic level. I sought to express my pain through a second sculpture. A woman with bandaged skin convulses, grasping her hand over her emaciated belly. As I coated her surface with reeking archival glue, it dawned on me that the glue was causing my face to flush red, my brain to fog, the skin on my hands to whither. "She Who Bears" is my testimony to awakening to the hazards of chemicals on my health. She answered my question, “What can I do to help myself?”
Being a disabled artist is a blessing and a curse. Functional time is precious and too often consumed with medical and financial necessities. My personal approach to art has developed through limitation: the inability to stand or sit for long or to use the majority of art materials because they are toxic, and the inability to attend classes and events. Dealing with my disability has taught me discipline, being present to the moment, and self-care. One aspect of caring for myself is to ensure that I have the time and energy to create.
Here I am, alive, at home with my two hands and two eyes. The human body and spirit are my sources of inspiration and expression, as well as my love of color, form and texture. How we define our boundaries, the sense of connection to one’s self, others and the environment, are fertile subjects of my inquiry.
Expressing myself through art is my joy, a way to fly into a reality of imagination and meditation. It feeds me. As I dialogue with my suffering, artful expression transmutes pain and I engage life. This is my work; an ember carefully tended over these many years, at last receiving nourishment to burn brighter and more faithfully mine.
Contact Selene at selene@slonet.org
