Chelsea Welsh ‘13 MFA
In ‘caught in the days unraveling,’ the physical act of wandering evokes a psychological wandering. Obsessed with the delusion that the world is full of hidden meaning, animal messengers, and a disquieting magic, the act of seeing became a kind of unsettling saving thing for me. A mysterious black cat followed me, so I followed it back, looking for signs. I stare into the blood-shot eyes of a pigeon and press the shutter, as if a picture could hold the elusive strangeness of the world—as if I weren’t already lost in some kind of Rorschach rabbit-hole of my own making. This wandering leads me on an elliptical journey – the more I try to lose myself, the more I realize I have become my own protagonist in a narrative behind the images, unable to distinguish the internal world from the external one, delusion from reality. I put the photographs together, as if they were a puzzle, as if they revealed some kind of message or omen. But they didn’t reveal anything about the world at all, just the way one world is seen, distorted by the mind. I cannot trust my eyes.
Chelsea Welsh is an artist from Walbridge, Ohio. She received an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013, and a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2009. Her photographs have appeared in Ain't Bad Magazine, Fotografia Magazine, Phases Mag, and Lenscratch, among others. She lives in Dexter, Michigan and is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program.