ELISE STÜRUP

ARTIST STATEMENT

To solidify the feeling of ownership of self, we sculpt and cast a mental image of our bodies. This is done through piecing together fragmented portions we can observe; the recognition of your hands and feet; the self-affirmation of viewing your own face in the mirror; seeing your full figure as a shadow on the wall; filtered and pixelated depictions of yourself specially curated to sit within a screen. These inverted and flattened echoes of our bodies distort and warp our self-perception. In the process of objectifying our bodies to build this sense of self, we can create conflicting realizations that can be both positive or negative, resulting in a false sense of the body. Through oil paint and textile, I attempt to navigate the portrayals and influence western culture has had on my sense of identity as a woman. In order to process my relationship with society’s fictitious feminine projections, I explores themes of obsession, perfectionism, and abstractions of the female form; I creates voids of scrambled figures, sterile, displaced, and hardly unrecognizable.

”To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. ( The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”
John Berger, Ways of Seeing