Marley Sepulveda

My series is centered around my fear of vulnerability. Despite my hesitance to let people in, I hope to force myself to let go of this fear.  I have focused on using self-portraiture and abstraction to represent the self-reflection I have done and the complexity of my fear.

Throughout my investigation, I experimented with new materials and how they could work together to illustrate my inquiry and create interesting textures in my pieces.  My pieces purposefully lack blending and highlight layers (Tired Eyes and Lock and Key) to focus on how being vulnerable is not something I can clean up and blend away, but instead has far more depth.  Layering is very important to my investigation with its relevance to layers of emotion.  I chose a color palette with heavy use of the color pink because it represents vulnerability to me. I mainly use acrylic, adding embroidery to enhance my ability to layer materials (Reaching Out).  The physical process of embroidering something is to hold pieces of fabric together similar to how I often feel I need to be held together.   This series of self-reflection has offered me closure to my fear and forced me to be vulnerable as I shared how I felt through my artwork.