ARTIST STATEMENT
My work centers on a girl literally trapped in a pickle. Through painting and sculpture, she becomes a metaphor for identity, pressure, and survival. The pickle functions as both body and metaphor: a protective shell that conceals, confines, preserves, and distorts. It is a suit, a disguise, a cover-up. She is visible yet obscured, armored yet exposed, trying to understand what remains when the identity she has relied upon no longer fits.
The work reflects my experience as an aging queer woman navigating the space between who I have been and who I am becoming. Through humor, absurdity, and repetition, I give form to experiences that can be difficult to articulate directly. Pickle Girl is strange and playful, but something quietly painful exists beneath the humor.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Neelie Hespen is a multidisciplinary artist and award-winning television assistant prop master born in Cleveland, Ohio. In seventh grade, she received a NASA award for a drawing imagining life in space in 2040—an early expression of the curiosity and storytelling that continue to shape her work.
She earned a BFA in Film and Art from Syracuse University and worked in clay animation in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, where she has spent more than two decades working in television production. Her credits include Arrested Development, American Horror Story, iCarly, Raven’s Home, Vampirina, and Wizards Beyond Waverly Place. She is a Prop Master Guild Award winner for her work on Disney’s Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
Her studio practice centers on paintings and sculptures featuring her recurring character, Pickle Girl, exploring identity, queerness, aging, humor, and survival.
Today, she divides her time between Los Angeles and Chicago.
© Neelie Hespen