Aimee Bosschart | Counter Narrative

Aimee Bosschart | Counter-Narrative

On View in the Third Floor Cafe through December 15th
Opening Reception, October 14th 1:00 - 4:00PM

For 15 years artist Aimee Bosschart worked primarily in clay. Handbuilding rather than throwing on a wheel, she made works both functional and aesthetic. And though she still loves the tactility of the medium, there were ideas she wanted to explore that eluded her in clay and felt promising in paint.

I really wanted to explore abstract painting with the intention of working
 through my identities as a brain injury survivor and a queer person.

How do we re-orient our minds to counteract a long-standing and destructive narrative about ourself?  Bosschart’s paintings now begin with a word that she would like to overcome, a way she has been thinking of—or describing—herself. She scratches the word into the paint, and then, with layers of additional color she writes a new word, over and over, with the goal of creating a Counter-Narrative. 

Quickly the original, disparaging words are no longer legible; they are instead a scar that has been worked over. They become something new.

It is an experiment for myself to make counter-narratives in writing and through 
painting on panels to see if I can shift the story from negative to positive.

The paintings also often include abstract fields of white, a reminder of the bright lights the artist saw waking up in the hospital after the traumatic brain injury. The artist also incorporates gauze, a physical tool for healing. The work is a meditation on healing both the artist’s brain and her mind, the patterns of thought that persist, dogging her.

I really focused on accepting the limitations I've been experiencing since my brain injury.
I allow the panels to become vessels to promote holding myself and caring for myself,
accepting what comes with my new brain.

Returning to ceramics, these sculptures begin as an offering, a meditation on grief, the place where the wonderful and the difficult and painful intersect. Bosschart started by writing letters in clay to a mentor who was—as she was making the works— in the midst of dying. Like the words in the paintings, the letters become abstracted after layer upon layer of words are folded into the clay and layers of glaze cover over them.  

What do we hide? What do we expose? What do we keep to ourselves? In parallel with the creating counter-narratives, Bosschart works at play, reminding herself of the importance of balance with the knowledge that the layering of our lives is unending. 

- Kija Lucas Curator