Diana Wickersham
Statement
I wished I was past the time of self-obsession, but there were parts of me that were still very young. The work was sitting with myself, looking at myself, fighting with myself. Always thinking, always feeling always trying to move past the me-ness.
Things I didn't have words for.
As I set down that path, I looked towards where I had been.
How frightening it had been to show myself.
I was exposed, bare. Recently, I had tried growing thicker skin, but it kept flaking off. At the end of it all, I am who I was made of.
My art is about not knowing. It's about being in between, trying to connect and make sense of the insensible, about the formation and the deconstruction of---
--sometimes my art is about the crushing.
I was raised in a spiritual family. Instead of trying to raise me under the doctrine of her own beliefs, my mother raised me in the Episcopal church.
This was, in my mom's eyes, a structure that would provide me with the greatest spiritual challenges, insight, and worth as I grew into my own personhood.
When I found myself jumping off my childhood's scaffolding, it occurred to me that the reasons why my mother raised me to be religious were the same reasons why I devoted my life to the creation of art.
Suddenly, at the end of a beginning,
I had learned.
