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 simultaneously conceals, confines, preserves, and distorts. It is a suit, a disguise, a cover-up. She is visible yet obscured, armored yet exposed, protected yet trapped, trying to understand what remains when the identity she has relied upon no longer fits.
The work reflects how I experience the world as an aging queer woman navigating the complicated space between who I have been and who I am becoming. The pickle becomes a vessel for exploring queerness, aging, isolation, societal expectations, and the psychological tension that comes with change.
Ultimately, these works explore the complicated act of existing authentically in a world that often asks us to preserve ourselves rather than evolve. The pickle becomes both armor and prison—a symbol of survival, but also of the courage it takes to question the identity we have built and imagine who we might become beyond it.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Neelie Hespen was born in Cleveland, Ohio. In seventh grade, she received a NASA award for a drawing imagining life in space in the year 2004—an early indication of the curiosity and storytelling that continue to shape her work today.
She studied at Syracuse University, earning a BFA in Film and Art, where she worked in clay animation. She continued working in clay animation in Chicago in the early 2000s before transitioning to live-action television after moving to Los Angeles. For more than two decades, she has worked in television production in the Property Department, creating the objects and visual details that help bring stories to life.
Her work can be seen in productions including Arrested Development, American Horror Story, iCarly, Raven’s Home, Vampirina, and Wizards Beyond Waverly Place. She is also a Prop Master Guild Award winner for her work on Disney’s Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
Alongside her work in entertainment, Neelie has maintained a dedicated studio practice, creating paintings and sculptures of her “Pickle Girl”
© Neelie Hespen