Rising Stars: Meet Claire Song

Today we’d like to introduce you to Claire Song.

Hi Claire, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. Can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
To be honest, I don’t really know; I’ve kind of just always done art. My earliest memory is drawing on the walls of the apartment where I grew up at the time, and my parents kind of just accepted it. In preschool, one of the teachers saw my potential with art and actually told my mom that I was very talented and that I should pursue art in the future. When I was little, I used to always carry some sort of sketchbook and a pencil, especially when we would go to gardens and zoos. I would spend hours drawing the flowers or animals that I saw during my visits there. In elementary school, I spent a lot of time alone, and often, I would hang out in the garden by myself, picking up worms and roly-polies. At the time, I had a huge fascination with worms and weddings, so every drawing would either be my family as worms, weddings, or worm weddings. As I got older, I got into making things like clay charms and handmade cards. I really enjoyed giving things that I made to people that I cared about because, personally, I cherish a handmade gift over a store-bought gift any day. When I was in high school, my work started to get more personal, and I then started to draw so I could vent about how I felt. Expressing how I feel in words is one of the most difficult things for me to do, so art kind of became a gateway to convey how I feel. Even as a kid, my mom would encourage me to draw when I wouldn’t communicate how I felt. Oftentimes I didn’t, but when I did, she was able to get a gist of how I was feeling.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t been easy. Throughout my life, I’ve struggled a lot with worrying that I don’t have actual talent or feeling like I don’t belong in the art community. I think that came from constantly being told that what I created was too weird or how I did something was always wrong. So when I got into Artcenter, I was surprised. I didn’t even think I deserved to go to college. In the back of my head, I thought that because I got into all the schools I applied for, everyone around me would expect more from me. So throughout the years, there’s been a constant battle with myself trying to be perfect and thinking that I’ll never be good enough. On top of that, growing up, I never felt like I belonged anywhere, so I’d constantly jump around trying to find ways to fit in with everyone. I just always felt out of place. In middle to high school, I was constantly called weird or different, so for the longest time, I was really insecure about myself.

When I entered Artcenter, I thought that I would meet people that are equally as weird as me, but it turns out I was even too weird for art students and even for some of the professors. Of course, along the way, I’ve met many people that encourage my weirdness, so now I embrace it. More recently, I was diagnosed with Autism, ADHD, and a learning disability, which was actually really difficult for me to process. Since I got my diagnosis as an adult, I’ve been trying to go through this process of paying attention and noticing things about myself that I didn’t think much about prior to my diagnosis. It’s also very difficult having to reteach yourself things and having to learn about how to regulate yourself and knowing your limits when all my life I’ve been taught to live the life of someone who is neurotypical. But with this diagnosis, many of the things that I’ve dealt with all my life now all made a lot of sense, like how I couldn’t keep up with people, processing emotions differently, and, most importantly, feeling different.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’d say I’m pretty versatile when it comes to the work I make. I do a lot of personal work, and much of it delves into darker aspects of my life. However, I always try to infuse humor into my work as well. Lately, my work has centered around religious trauma and my relationship with religion, which can be a controversial topic for some people. I think my work can spark up a lot of conversation, which is ironic to me because I don’t like speaking. My work’s interpretation depends on how the audience views it, so there’s no fixed narrative. There’s no wrong or right answer. It’s really satisfying when someone sees my work and is able to think from a perspective that I didn’t even see before. I find it fascinating. More recently, I’ve started to make sculptures, something I’ve found myself enjoying and want to continue doing, but I’m still open to being experimental with new mediums.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
The art world is constantly changing, and with all this virtual reality stuff, I definitely feel like the art world is immersing itself into everything digital. I’ve already seen that artists are starting to have virtual galleries, which is something that I’m still trying to get used to, but I feel that it lacks the physical feeling that a real gallery has. I mean, we already have so many things that are digital now; I can’t imagine what we’ll have in a couple of years. I’ve actually never really thought about it. It kind of makes me scared thinking about it.

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