Читать книгу I Write Artist Statements - Liz Sales - Страница 15

Claire Fisher

I first learned that I was an artist from my Aunt Sarah. She’d seen a collage I’d made for a school assignment, a self-portrait casting myself as Medusa, and proclaimed me “a natural.” Later I found photography through my brother-in-law Billy, who invited me over to take pictures of him. I captured the curve of his spine of his back, and through this gesture somehow revealed his vulnerable character while foreshadowing our future together.

While studying art at LAC-Arts College, I focused primarily on my family and home life. I was born and raised above the funeral parlor that my late father and brothers owned and operated, so my daily life was rich with content. For example, a plumbing issue once caused blood to erupt in our house, and I was able to capture the aftermath, visualizing the strange nature of our lives and relationship to death.

As a college student, I, of course, briefly experimented with lesbianism, with my friend Edie. While this relationship was short-lived, it did bring me back to portraiture. This led me to my biggest artistic breakthrough, portraits achieved by shooting and printing images of individual subjects, ripping those prints up and then reassembling them into masks to be worn by the original subject. The resulting images combine photography, collage, and sculpture while referring to the concept of the death mask.

While I am unclear on what work I made, after moving to New York, I’m glad to here that I will marry my ex-boyfriend Ted, after returning to California in 2025, and even happier to know that I will die of old age, surrounded by friends and loved ones, to the tune of Sia’s “Breathe Me.”