BioOriginally from Oregon, Chloe Mariah Donaldson is a visual artist, writer, and traveler. She received BAs in art and English from Benedictine College in Kansas, 2012. In 2015, she received an MA with distinction in creative writing, from Bangor University, North Wales. For the past few years, Chloe has been travelling in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Alaska, the Caribbean, Yellowstone, Oregon, and back to Kansas. She currently teaches English in Southeast Kansas.
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Artist Statement
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My work seeks to examine sense of place and home, and the emotional connections to Home as identity. I am interested in deconstructing domestic imagery, working with icons of Americana, femininity, family life, and social norms. I draw from advertising, folklore, and nostalgia, and examine them for their darker, hidden layers. Tea sets, valentines, pinup girls, beer commercials, farm houses, road trips, and magazine ads from the ‘50s and ‘60s are all a part of the artifice of identity that I want to turn upside down.
I also look at home and place from an eco-critical perspective. I want to break down barriers between wildness and home, between the wilderness and the domestic. I am interested the shapes in nature, and how often they are repeated. I also work with the idea of hidden realities, things lurking just under the surface. Because of this, I have often used the iconography of fairytales, magic, and images of drowning to convey a sense of breaking the barriers between the worlds and ideas. My interest in place comes from never being in one area for very long. I came from a family that moved frequently, from one state to the other, several times across the country. After completing undergrad, I have been travelling frequently. Because of this, I frequently have feelings of rootlessness, somewhere between freedom and homesickness, the desire for belonging and the compulsion to wander. In my work as an illustrator, I continue to look at the world with a dark, somewhat humorous view, deconstructing the cute and pretty. I like to play with cute, sentimental images, and recast them in absurd or horrific contexts. My art, illustration, and writing draw from realist grounding in place, surrealist and magic realist mythmaking and dreams, and eco-critical examinations of wilderness. I am especially interested in wildness, the relationships between icons and their real counterparts, and the use of artiface as identity. Masks, commercials, fashion, puppets, and dolls all make appearances as objects of the artificial. Likewise, I repeat certain figures –the bear, the fish, the wolf, antlers, and wings– as icons that stand both for themselves, as well as the responses they create in others. The goal of my artwork is to break down barriers between reality and perceived reality, between mythmaking and the concrete, between land and water, and to examine the ambiguous, the dream-like, and the hidden. I wish to find voices in those who are silent, to listen, and to preserve the fragile, beautiful, difficult to define things that nevertheless make up so much of life: woodlands, flowers, a treasured object, a childhood memory, friendships, cherished conversations –without falling into sentimentality or denying the darker sides of life. I want to listen to quiet voices, tell hidden stories, and air secrets. In my writing, especially, I seek a place between elevating the unheard and uncomfortable voyeurism, less interested in greatness or the American Dream, than in closed doors and personal secrets, hopes, and nightmares. "This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body." –WALT WHITMAN |
Favorite Artists |
I am especially inspired by the artwork of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Diana Al-Hadid, Ralph Steadman, and Odilon Redon, and the writing of Herman Melville, Marilynne Robinson, David Foster Wallace, Dostoevsky, Denise Riley, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. I also find inspiration in minimalist painters, Japanese Haiku, classical Greek and Roman writers, and existentialist philosophers. Currently, I am looking at the idea of film as suspended time: slices of time taken out of the context of reality. In a sense, movies, film, and video as immortality. I am especially interested in the works of Jan Svankmajer, the Quay brothers, David Lynch, Vera Chytilová, Kelly Reichardt, Stanley Kubrick, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and the way that each director plays with artifice, time, and space.
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