ARTIST STATEMENT
My works, made throughout the pandemic, wrestle with emotional expression and shame. Personal events that happened in conjunction with the pandemic, revealed hidden parts of myself. These parts were behind a heavy red curtain of shame. I dared to peek behind it, go backstage, and attempt to source the whys of my own decision-making, my thoughts and motivations, and my emotional reactions. This labor revealed to me, disguised puppet masters. What I accepted as love, was cyclical comfort in chaos; what I thought was communication, was delicate maneuvering that in honesty, revealed nothing; what I thought was care, was survival. These sometimes painful revelations allowed me to recognize how societal and familial beliefs were embedded in my own relationships: with others and within myself.
A Pudgy House for Doll Parts Revealed, a foreboding humor, came from the inner landscape, where the semiotics of my own psychology find their home in long-ago discarded doll parts, craft felt, and a mysterious hand acting as a tool to reveal and hide the truths submerged in unassuming vessels.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shelby Hubbard is a sewist, sculptor, and writer. She was born and raised across the rural and urban South. Hubbard is reexamining her familial and intimate relationships through the tools and aesthetics of their girlhood and adolescence to better understand trauma’s short- and long-term impacts on their brain and body. Hubbard uses fabric, textiles, sewing, and paper mâché to bring these impacts into physical reality. Play, tactile exploration, craft skills, and therapeutic practices are processes to explore their experiences. Motivated by curiosity, Hubbard traverses her own experiences to better understand her true self, the nuance of tangled relationships, conversations around trauma, family history, and memory.
Hubbard currently resides in the South. She graduated with her MFA in Studio Art at Florida State University in the Spring of 2022. She received her undergraduate degree in Rural Studies Writing and Communication at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. Her work has been seen in a cumulative solo residency and show at Plough Gallery in Tifton, GA. As an MFA candidate, her work has been shown at various group shows at Working Method Contemporary and 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, FL, and online through Collar Works in Troy, New York.
Before entering graduate school, Hubbard was a freelance writer for the local paper The Tifton Gazette, local magazines, and the contemporary online art magazine BURNAWAY. Hubbard has primarily lived in the South and seeks to create a more hospitable South through truth-sharing and artmaking.
© Shelby Hubbard