I grew up in Los Angeles and am now attending The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I am studying fiber arts while also focusing on comedy.
I am only 19, but I have experienced enough to write a drama series for HBO. Since I have been through so much in these condensed years, I am hilarious. Whether it's because I am deflecting pain, in need of attention, or whatever my therapist says, I use humor constantly. In getting a BFA, humor is often a head-scratcher to my fine art community, and I often see my peers creating work using raw and discomforting emotions, which is great, but it makes what I do less credible (at least internally). I do make work that expresses those painful emotions, but for me, they always seem to lack the Kate Hassett Factor, which is just adding weirdness.
As I look around at the art around me in this contemporary world, I don’t feel involved in the art I see without noticing the artist’s hand. This is probably why I had such a strong connection with impressionist art when I was younger, but today the artist’s hand is much more complex. An artist that I am heavily inspired by is Cindy Sherman, and while she is a photographer, I can see her hand. Instead of the visible artist’s hand of Cezanne, Sherman shows her artist’s hand through her presence of what I can only articulate as mysteriously comical discomfort. Her work clearly comes from a human mind who doesn’t see the world at face value. I believe that my appreciation for the artist’s hand comes from growing up surrounded by technology and the more recent AI art generator that is infesting artists.
Back to me. Today I find that the artistic hand I can show the world is feminine weirdness. This stems from the fact that being placed as a female body in America has led to my hard times, and I am just weird. Both being a female and being weird have resulted in bullying within my early childhood, but today I feel defined by it in the best way possible. I feel that people see me as a woman who is weird, and there is nothing better to me than being weird. I’ve never met a normal person I actually want to be friends with; that’s just boring.
So here I am, making fiber art, photographs, drawings, and whatever the hell I want to embrace being a weird woman.
