Bio
Rachel Doub is a multimedia sculptor and performance artist from East Tennessee. Rachel graduated from the University of Tennessee with her BFA in Three-Dimensional art in May 2020 and is currently making work and staying safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Artist Statement
Moments of rawness, honesty, and vulnerability seem few and far between in our culture. We mask ourselves with makeup, post unrealistic photos about our reality, and create aesthetics for what we believe will capture the attention of others. I yearn to know what reality is beneath this digital cover and how our authentic experiences and feelings can be explained through a different form of visual representation. I create intimate moments for empathy that allows others to step into a bodily dream. Personification and anthropomorphization are ingrained in our brain and drive our comprehension when we experience art and our world.
The nexus of my work relies on relaying memory and experience. My visual language is made up of blobs and amorphous shapes that exist in my mind and evoke the essence of the body. I form shapes, create shells, make molds, manipulate clay, and seep materials through each other. My environments or objects are place for inquiry where I excavate their insides and the place they currently exist or once existed. When I am not employing these shapes, I am attaching things to my body and using them to tell a story or share a moment. Making my body vulnerable or creating an object that carries that weight or gestures a familiar trauma allows me illustrate emotions attached to memory or experience. Using my body is daunting yet necessary for me to explore what I am making and why.
What imitates the body makes me question my own. I create a juxtaposition between life and death, natural and synthetic, hard and soft, and full and empty. This allows me to question the reality of a moment. I wonder if my memory is real or if my mind has distorted reality. I explore how memory changes and question what I can trust. I make room to show grace to my discomfort and I find validity in what that experience has left behind.
I manipulate fabric, clay, and metal or destroy the pristine to create trauma. Raw material becomes flesh or trash becomes entrails. Memory is thrust onto the surface or frozen in space. Renewal of spirit is something intimate and soft, growing and uncomfortable. Weight or the absence of weight portrays emotional heaviness or gesture. My body is both a tool and a material for making which in itself is a physical process.
The history of art, how the body has been depicted, and how artists who suffered from mental illness or trauma expressed themselves through their work intrigues me. What art says about the maker consumes my mind in all my experiences and informs my investigations. I want to understand why people respond or act as they do, what experiences formed them, how I can better understand their World and how others could understand me. My hope is that my art makes room for some physical form of that understanding.
