SHEALYN OTO
Fine Artist
"I've spent many years of my life attempting to understand my personal identity, breaking apart my psyche and analyzing it. In this work, I'm responding to that analysis, focusing on my my experiences with mental illness, trauma, and obsessive intrusive thoughts. I create drawings and sculptures that abstract and crop my body, each piece responding to intrusive thoughts I've had about my body. Art-making serves as a visual diary and coping mechanism for me, and by making these works, I hope to learn to love myself again "
- Shealyn Oto
Excerpt from wall statement at Senior Show
Breast Drawings
"This first series of drawings is a response to intrusive thoughts about my body. These "breast drawings" specifically relate to my thoughts on my gender and sexual identity, and how my perception of my body has changed over time due to physical and psychological trauma. In these thoughts, I was severing my breasts form my body, mushing them together with other breast mounds, wait for the flesh to amalgamate, and then suspend the large mass from a hook, like a piece of meat. In my mind, my body was this piece of meat, an object that is used for consumption.
Fat Drawings
This second series of drawings is a response to intrusive thoughts I've had about my body fat. I've always had negative thoughts about my body, associating it with shame and disgust, and obsessing over it's imperfections. In order to counteract these ideas about myself, I decided to create drawings emphasizing these parts of my body. The materiality for these works was really important. Charcoal is a material that requires time, patience, tenderness and consideration. I believed that in making these drawings, I was giving my body the same tenderness and consideration.
Internal Sculptures
In addition to the drawings, I created a series of sculptures in my thesis. While the drawings focused on the exterior body, these works focused on the interior body, and the intrusive thoughts I associate with it. The fabric sculptures respond to ideas about holding my internal organs, and as such, these pieces are interactive. Another interactive piece in is the bowl of teeth responds to ideas and nightmares I've had concerning hundred or human teeth. Finally, the "human hairball" is a piece made in response to my experiences with and risk factors associated with Trichotillomania and Trichophagia, a hair pulling/consuming disorder that I've had for many years.