an artist's statement Self-Portrait of a Trichotillomaniac Audrey Williams
M
y work serves as a counterargument to the pressures and demands of modern culture, as well as the ones we inflict upon ourselves.
I create portraits of the mundane, the ugly, and the boring in order to celebrate and memorialize them—to undo some of the damage done to young people in an anxiety-ridden, information-saturated world. My inspiration is often drawn from body dysmorphia. My own trichotillomania and OCD highlight imperfections. I explore these flaws and combine them with the mass media and society’s expectations of beauty, which young women must face daily. The supersized scale of my portraits amplify pores, cuts, bruises, and asymmetry. This is not an attempt to find beauty in ugliness, but to celebrate ugliness and imperfection as their own truth. My portraits’ exploration of meticularity and nitpicking of single features encourages viewers to let go of some of their own self-consciousness. As a young woman who produces realistic representations of the human form, I’m compelled to create an alternative to the mainstream images we are force-fed through popular media. 36
