Today we’d like to introduce you to Amelia Borja
Amelia, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I am originally from Laramie, Wyoming, which, as a queer person is a strange place to be from, many people in the community are familiar with my hometown because of the “Laramie Project” a performance piece based on real events of a homophobic hate crime that occurred in the 1990’s. I didn’t really realize the impact of these events until much later in my life, but they add an unmistakable flavor to my memories of early adulthood.
I left Laramie to attend graduate school in Baltimore MD at the Maryland Institute College of Art where I met my wife. She had spend time moving back and forth between her hometown on the east coast an Los Angeles, navigating coming out in the early 2000’s. She convinced me to try out Los Angeles when we graduated and we have been here ever since. I think both of us appreciate the diversity and acceptance here given our respective backgrounds.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
As this is an interview for “creatives” I imagine I’m not the first to mention the absolute dreadful way that our culture treats artists. We hold immense value for art, often deifying artists themselves, but there is also a notion that artists must earn this through struggle. It is almost impossible to support yourself through art and yet the number of calls for work and artists that not only expect to display work for free, but require payment from the artist to be considered is, astonishing.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I try not to specialize in anything, but it has been difficult to avoid. I am a visual artist and my art is multidisciplinary; sculpture, painting, photography etc. The unifying part of my work is usually thematic rather than material.
I like my work to be situated somewhat between the beautiful and the abject, in that uncanny space where these things exist not on two sides of a spectrum, but within the feeling of the sublime. That feeling that comes when something is both foreign but familiar, frightening but intriguing, gross but delightfully tactile.
To make work like this, I think, requires a good deal of intimacy with one’s subject, the kind of creative freedom that comes with things like self-deprecating humor. You can say things about yourself you would never say to someone else, and despite the discomfort you may feel in your own body, you aren’t closer to anyone in the world – you have full access. Consequently, my art is almost exclusively self-portraiture. My body, like many others I expect, has a dual personality, I try to give a nod to its talent for both misery and delight.
When I began this trajectory of work I was mostly focused on trauma. It was 2016 and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score was new and groundbreaking. I certainly resonated with what he presented, that the body holds your traumatic experiences, even if you don’t think you remember them. My first work about the body was called “Divided”- a torso, veins, moles, hairs and all literally cut to pieces. I accompanied the sculpture with a photograph of me holding it, “Self- Portrait, Divided” to contextualize it as a self-portrait. My more recent work is a little more specific in that it’s about a particular part of the body (the belly). The diptych work, “Primordial Pouch (Outside / Inside)” uses a circular form as a kind of motif. The belly isn’t a circle, neither are the organs within it and yet symbolically that’s the shape it has become. A circle broadly represents the idea of the piece, the circle of life – live, die ; eat, excrete etc.. The “Outside” piece is a recreation of the surface of my own belly. The “Inside” is based on a combination of images taken of the Orion Nebula, a gastroscopy (the inside of someone’s stomach) and a hysteroscopy (the inside of someone’s uterus) – all things that in a way create or give life. I began developing this piece during the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. As a queer woman exploring growing my family with my partner, the decision by the court drove the works focus on the uterus as a main source of inspiration. The final piece of the series “Ebb’s” name is an ambigram because it also looks like an egg. It’s life size, I made certain I could technically fit inside it. Eggs are like an external uterus, a body outside a body and in that way are a perfect representation of the abject and the strange relationship of our bodies and minds. Our bodies nurture us, support us, cultivate, and enable our lives, we retreat into them for primal comfort. Yet, we are also trapped inside them – forced to serve their needs, resent them for their inability to provide all we ask, and doomed to suffer their endless disconnect with our minds. Like outer space, our bodies are something we exist in, yet somehow remain mysterious and inaccessible.
Through these sculptures, and others within the same body of work, I hope to evoke questions about the delicate interplay between suffering and pleasure, estrangement and connection, all within in the abject yet beautiful intricacies of our somatic existence.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Hmmm, well I can easily say I have always enjoyed making things, crafts, drawings, performances. I spend a great deal of time as a young person dabbling in different crafts. I was very impatient, not necessarily with the work itself but with waiting to procure the proper tools and materials. I still have this urgency to create work now and sometimes I end up wrecking something or injuring myself instead of waiting for an order of materials to arrive or even going to another room to get the right tool.
My family is very active, to the extreme, think world class competitions in skiing, running, climbing, mountaineering etc. There was a lot of pressure to engage in sports and physical training. It wasn’t that I didn’t have encouragement to peruse art, but a massive amount of my time went into teams and outdoor activities. After getting home from various practices and workouts I usually avoided my homework to spend time working on my projects until deep into the night. My grades certainly suffered from this and I had extreme anxiety. There were a lot of secret dark things lurking in my family as well, which I wasn’t explicitly aware of at the time. My family was loving, involved and supportive but I think there were some severe mental health struggles. I absorbed a lot of that as a kid and teenager and my artwork at the time was pretty dark as a result.
Pricing:
- I don’t think so, you can follow me on Instagram and check out my work at any upcoming exhibitions.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ameliavercauterenborja.com/
- Instagram: @ameliavercauterenborja
Image Credits
All photos are taken and owned by the artist Amelia Borja
