Statement
It’s hard to escape one’s innermost thoughts. They’re omnipresent, looming over everything like a dark cloud foretelling a storm. Remnants of the past or anxieties for the future seep their way into each crack and crevice of the mind’s experience, twisting the world around into a constant reminder of those issues. These deep seated insecurities root themselves so far into the psyche it’s impossible to separate the irrational work of the mind from reality. It is only through removing oneself from their current situation that these irrational thoughts can be seen for what they truly are. Placing the mind in an environment free from the day-to-day stresses, intrusive and irrational thinking is given nothing to latch itself onto, leaving itself exposed, sticking out like a dark bruise on pale skin. My work scars looks to display the intrusive thoughts and anxieties that plague my mind for what they truly are: deep wounds that have yet to heal, finding any way they can to insert themselves into my thinking.
In May 2024, I took a school trip to Greece in order to learn about ancient history and also work on this project. I saw this trip as a form of escapism, jumping headfirst into an unknown experience in hopes it would distract me from my current problems. I set out to create a series of photos highlighting Greek art and its ties to femininity, queerness, and androgyny. In the process of creating these photos, however, I began to notice my eye being drawn to the more ambiguous photos. Photos that meant seemingly nothing in relation to my current goal of the project kept drawing me back over and over again for reasons I couldn’t figure out. A photo of a girl’s legs in a pool of water or the sprawling Athens cityscape did nothing to contribute to my original prompt and yet I couldn’t find a way to write them off. It was as if something in those photographs called to a part of my mind that I didn’t realize yet. There’s a video game series called Silent Hill written by the Japanese creator Teiichiro Toyama that served as heavy inspiration for scars. In the game series, a town called Silent Hill serves as a sort of personalized Hell, luring characters into the town by manipulating itself to serve their desires. Once in the town, the characters are forced to face manifestations of their own fears, guilts, and losses that appear to the player as grotesque depictions of environments, entities, and creatures. A character in the game named Heather Mason is plagued by the anxieties and fears of growing into adulthood, being seen as a woman with responsibilities rather than a naive girl. As a result, the environment around her in Silent Hill reflects those fears, with hostile and confusing architecture surrounding her and the path she tries to escape by turning and shifting on itself. The photos in Scars serve as a presentation of my own “SIlent Hill” with portions of the photographs being manipulated and stripped away to highlight my own internal turmoil.
The manipulation of these images aims to create the visual effect of an open wound. The cut away portions of the photographs are given a background of white paper which is then covered in a layer of blood. These wounds allow the viewer to see beyond the surface level photograph and into the underlying thoughts that drive the creation of each one. The shape of the cutouts, the placement, and the words that lie beneath them all serve to create an entryway into my irrational thoughts. As a transgender woman, many of my internal struggles revolve around femininity and the intangible parts of womanhood that I will seemingly never be able to experience. These struggles manifest themselves in scars with much of the imagery in the work pointing back to my seemingly futile attempt at embracing femininity. Words that echo in my mind reveal themselves below the images and many of the cutouts serve a constant reminder of what I will never have. These wounds are ever present and exist beyond the paper they are placed upon, and through time I hope they will eventually heal and become scars like the title implies.