Isabel Harrison

Feme, 2024

I am drawn to the pursuit of knowledge. Art is how we live, and as we navigate our consumerist identities within modern American culture I urge us to consider this identity. The value we accumulate from participation in a system that becomes more and more removed from the actual material, and rather relies on things meant to be purchased instead of things meant to last. My project relies on proximity to a feminine experience along with the consideration of learning material competence that has so long been associated with such an experience. Material competence refers to the comfortability with crafting; sewing and cooking, carpentry and mechanics. My project consists of a Acrylic painting on second hand canvases that represents my view of femininity, along with a pair of pants that I upcycle with second hand materials. The final piece is a collection of zines to be given away, filled with poems that relate to my themes of personal experience and material competence.

About the Artist

It's raining and I am 10 years old and I am happy, but moments away from breaking. It is early fall, when the air still got cold in Northern California, and the leaves became their shades of red, orange, and yellow and gusts of cold winds fought to blow them off branches. And I am sitting in my grandparents trailer, and I am drawing at the small table by the window that looks out into the woods. My grandma – even though she hates the rain, and the wind, and to be cold – says, “Belle, I'm so happy the trees get the drink”.

I draw stars at the kitchen table, and she draws flowers, and my grandpa tells a joke and my brother tells us a story. I look out the window, and the red leaves are wet, and that is Art. My whole life is Art.

It is Tuesday, and I am bored, and I desperately want to see pictures in my head, but I can't, and I ask, how do you see the world mum? And she tells me she can see her keys hanging on the hook in the mudroom while we stand in the kitchen, and she can see her lamp in her childhood bedroom, and her fathers face even though he passed before I was born, and I turn around while talking to her stare at the log wood wall, and I can't see her face, but I remember its Art.

My creative practice is based in desperation to see the world in a non-nihilistic context, for once to believe people are inherently good, to reach past a misanthropic tendency and see what's beautiful all around. Catch me staring at the smooth edges of drywall and recalling my father’s hands. Find me running my fingers across a wooden tabletop, tracing the grain of wood, and reminiscing on days I spent building tables in the garage with my grandpa. Listen to me retell a story my brother shared so desperately, because he's mastered the art of conversation. And finally see me stand on the street, reach down for a worm in a muddy puddle on the asphalt, and pick it up, its body wriggling in my palm, and I still can't picture my mother’s face.

Its 10 AM, and I am not a morning person, and even though I took shower last night my palms are covered in acrylic paint, and as I kick my comforter off my body, my sketchbook falls to the floor because somehow I fell asleep with it by my side, tucked in next to me, as if I'm a child who needs their stuffed toy to sleep. And I, like a dead thing being played with by shaking hands, stumbles into the kitchen, and my hands operated by larger hands pour a glass of water and I thank god as if I could believe, that water is so good, and I prop myself up against the cold counter and smell coffee as its poured into my mug, and then I'm on the ground by the window, and light floods in and I paint. And then hours go by, and my head feels empty but my hands are covered in paint. And is there a point where the Art starts and I stop or is it a dichotomy at all?

Art and artists, misleading. Art is not only a practice, but it also happens to be the viewership, it also happens to reside in the public sphere and as poets have never capitalized neither shall I. So I sit and watch the posture of my friends, and the decoration of my peers' homes, and my mother's paintings. Maybe I'm an artist because we all have a career to embody, or maybe I'm an artist because that's the most human way to be, and deep inside I really love people, and I make art for the lovers. Though, can art be hate and love in the same breath?