ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is an ongoing exploration of escapism from the painful elements of my childhood and explores this theme through a juxtaposition of the comforting and the disturbing. My art is imagined through the perspective of a disturbed child and created by the adult who continues to face the emotional impact of these experiences. As a child, stuffed animals provided me with comfort and protection amidst my parents’ violent arguments. I cared for them as though they were alive, turning their eyes away when I cried and tucking them in at night. I imagined that my menagerie of stuffed animals became an army of protectors, filling the spaces where love and security were otherwise absent.
My 3D works are composed of thrift store stuffed animals, which I take home and bathe, and orient in my bedroom to sit on rocking chairs or cribs made for dolls. They are taken care of as I had done when I was a child, as though they are living creatures. Yet, they are also ripped apart, cut into, and sewn back together. as a representation of the ways I have been broken as a child, and my longstanding struggles with self-harm that I used as a physical manifestation of my emotional turmoil. The true juxtaposition, however, lies between the inherent innocence of childhood and the perspective of a child whose upbringing has been completely stripped of this innocence.
My 2D works realize these creatures through brightly colored acrylic paintings, with no limits to the creatures’ physicality, like human limbs attached to stuffed animal heads or bodies standing protectively and enthusiastically with a content child, as a representation of the same theme my 3D works explore. While my 3D works allude to a character and their emotional state, my 2D works visually realize this person to viewers.
There is a tension between the unsettling new additions of the stuffed animals and their intrinsic nature as a comforting object in both my 2D and 3D works, and yet a completely new life and context is breathed into each piece through this process. I create a space that is one where both the innocence and complexity of childhood coexist, offering an invitation for viewers of my work to reflect on the uncomfortable aspects of their own upbringings.
BIOGRAPHY
Catherine Fan is a multidisciplinary artist working mainly with paintings and sculpture. Through both their 2D and 3D works, Fan explores the childhood trauma they have experienced utilizing the visual elements of children’s toys and juxtaposing their innocent imagery by creating unsettling additions to these toys. In doing this, their work transforms commonplace children’s toys into peculiar creatures, a symbolism of both the significance of children’s toys in Fan’s life and simultaneously a projection of how their experiences with childhood abuse have shaped them.
CONTACT
EMAIL: cfan010101@gmail.com
