Chairs on the Brain.
Portland, OR. 01-2025
Paper mache covered sculpture using five years of personal journals placed onto found chairs. When I first started sifting through my journals between 2016-2023 for the creation of this piece, I was operating under the assumption that I could easily separate passages that discussed me and my own self-understanding from passages that discussed others or the world at large. I hoped that doing this would reveal to me a sense of self separate from “all that other stuff”. All of the “I’s” would be in the first pile, right? The more I read, the more intertwined I saw the writings become. Sara Ahmed argues in The Cultural Politics of Emotion that “emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices.” Making this piece reminded me of the powerful work emotions with and without us do in shaping our senses of self and our understandings of the world.