Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Chapin.
Hi Elizabeth, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in Mississippi and started painting portraits in high school. In 2018 I started cutting them off the stretchers, stuffing and sewing them into dimensional free-standing forms supported by internal welded armatures. The impulse came initially from wanting paintings to be relationships. How can paintings undulate and become unruly, be caressed and wrangled. A friend joked that I was making friends for myself, an extension of my childhood Barbie dioramas. She is not wrong. Once I started cutting and stuffing, something Frankensteinian did flicker. Arboreal, human and vegetal bodies of paint now reach back for me. I light them from within, sew secret pockets with messages, add animated painted projection and photographic video, and embed smells and monitors. This mixture is a striving towards creatureliness, aliveness, towards paintings that misbehave and devour. There is something about hoping the work will confront me, seduce me, meet me as I meet it, but also dissolve me and dissolve the very desire to be met, to obliterate even the idea of meeting, which presumes separateness.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’m trying to see obstacles as the part of the way. I am my biggest obstacle. Any stories I have about myself or the world that distract me from just working and living steadily are the obstacles.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I think the idea of being set apart from others is, in itself, an obstacle, an illusion.
So I try to dissolve that as best I can.
My most recent body of work, entitled Nectar, is an atmosphere of flower glow. Each flower is a painting dismembered and re-formed with different weights/transparencies of gauze or canvas, with droop, pockets, glow, hinge, crochet, bead, seed, wrap or drip. My language is a response to the flower’s language.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
I wish I had gone to art school instead of going to college “for a well rounded education.” But then again, making paintings while being oblivious to “the art world” can be a very honest place. At one point, after coming out of my bubble and realizing how oblivious I was, I set about educating myself on this “art world.” Which honestly just created performances, distractions and frenzies. I am trying to re-enter my bubble. Not to put my head in the sand, but to try to know and enjoy my own voice.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.elizabethchapin.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethchapin/?hl=en
