Chelsea Wrightson creates works from vivid dreams and walking meditations, channeling new futures that support feminine approaches to sustainability, care, and more.
Chelsea Wrightson is a multimedia artist and mother whose practice includes painting, sculpture, and ceramics. Her work reflects her experiences of interconnectedness in our expanding universe and consciousness.
“‘We are never too late to not feel invisible.’ Whispered to me in a dream, I am working to accept this call to myself and to amplify voices of creativity in my community. I create compositions on paper with graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor that combine imagery from my vivid dreams and walking meditations.
Altars of Imperfection are bas-relief oil paintings made of poured plaster castings from my collection of disposable single-use plastics. The plaster castings are set in harmonic compositions, locked in space with a poured plaster finish. This body of work is an alchemical shift from waste to altar; at once a reflection of our reverence for single-use materials, a nod to their permanent fossilized deposits, and an imagined alternate-reality beyond their use and proliferation.
On a molecular level, plastic is one of the strongest human inventions. White-supremacist patriarchy sits in direct parallel. Entire ecosystems have been organized around their existence. Entire realities of being must be reimagined. Our temples of trash and our legacies are being built into the landscape in real-time, with little consideration of the lasting effects of either.
Since the rise of colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism, we have been heavily influenced by masculine systems of life: scarcity, individualism, competition, materialism, and consumption. By creating this work I seek to reconcile my relationships with living beings and the giving earth. I am listening to the past and channeling new futures where feminine approaches of collaboration, sustainability, empathy, care, mindfulness, abundance, resourcefulness, and reciprocity are able to flourish.”
Albuquerque, NM | chelseawrightson.com | ig: @c.wright.son