Date of Submission
Spring 2021
Academic Program
Studio Arts
Project Advisor 1
Beka Goedde
Abstract/Artist's Statement
BUTTER
My fat body has grown to be a keeper of my emotional state.
My fat body has held my angst, and endured my frustrations.
My fat body has kept me safe and breathing.
My fat body has let me down.
My fat body has stretched and ripped clothes.
My fat body has been patient with my anger.
My fat body has felt ecstasy and pride.
My fat body has forgotten it was fat.
My fat body has transformed.
My fat body has been confused about how to feel.
My relationship to my fatness has never stopped changing. Confusion yanks me in every direction at once: joy, anger, neutrality, annoyance, forgetfulness, shame, pride. Among this there are constants I face, constants that have swayed between positive, negative, and neutral association. Constants of pressure, tension, constraint, stretching, bulging, drooping, sliding, rubbing, sticking, rearranging.
“BUTTER” showcases my ever changing relationship to these constants. Intimately engaging with each sculpture, drawing and print caused shift, reversal and reexamination of my emotional association with pressure and tension. With the sliding of sweaty fat rolls, with taught denim stretched across belly and thighs, with rising and moving while drooping from gravity.
Each piece’s process mimics the same pressure, pushing, tension and self inflicted discontentment which I experience through each day. The constraint of breath as plaster gauze is wrapped around my chest and back, the motion of grasping at and spreading soft butter into a hardened shell of my torso, of using my hands to bulge it's dairy fatness onto paper; the flexing of hand, knee and foot as I hover millimeters above the floor in a rapidly solidifying mold agent, the new sensation of my entire weight reduced onto several harnessed points of my body, the relief washing over me as my skin meets cool, impressionable metal.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Nicolson, Celia Crawford, "BUTTER" (2021). Senior Projects Spring 2021. 307.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2021/307
Process video of "counterweight"
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.