Stella Mulroney

Artist Statement

My work is largely centered around the grotesqueness of our bodies as well as the pressures they all must endure. I am tired of artworks that display the beauty of the human form. This is not to say that the human form is not beautiful, nor that these works are not poignant or worthwhile. It is to say that there is a certain excruciating roughness to the skin we live in that I find to be often unexplored.

Bodies do not always feel good - they are heavy and full and sore and crawling with memories that bite them. They tear and break and get old and rot. This fragility and instability of our forms - their fleetingness - makes them all the more beautiful.

Bodies are a harboring of our experiences - sometimes we want to tear our skin away because it becomes so full, so saturated, with memory. Pain starts in our stomach and grows outwards, snaking its way through our tendons all the way to the tips of us. This pain can be physical, it can live in present or memory. I see how it becomes us. I want to show that to people.

By using a mixture of photography, videography, and installation, along with materials such as liquid latex and stage blood, I aim to create works that harbor both beauty and a sense of uncomfortable fascination. I want to show you how gross and unruly our bodies can be, especially when over-full with memory and trauma and pain. I want to keep you fascinated in their forms, repulsed and invited all at once.

I am also quite interested in subconscious worlds and dream spaces - the sometimes non-sensical and sometimes painfully true places our mind wanders when we are not there to tell it not to. I am someone who consistently has nightmares - eldritch beings visiting me and telling me the horrifying truths of the world before disappearing forever, taking their memory with them. Elements of these sort of ethereal, almost untraceable memories and moments appear often in my work, as I am interested in the way subconscious experience inhabits the body as well. I want to show you how layers of skin are like the layers in the trunk of a tree - ever moving outwards, pushed by new growth and new pain, peeling and dampening and flaking away. How our bodies move with our minds, our memories, our thoughts. How we keep it all together, all inside, and how that insular, tightening feeling that takes its toll on our bones and our muscles and the heaviness of our eyelids might look if we could only see it.