Chelsea Welsh is a photographer from Walbridge, Ohio. She received her BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2009, and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013. Her work has appeared in various blogs such as Lenscratch, Phases Mag, Don/Dean, and the Latent Image. She currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts as Residence Director of a transitional group home for adults with mental illness.
“In caught in the days unraveling, I find myself in a narrative behind the images. For me, the physical act of wandering triggers a psychological wandering. Outside, I use the animals, the light, and the suburban plant life as my compass to getting lost. I follow behind the footsteps of a stray, turn at illuminations or shadows, walk in the direction a plant may be pointing. Brief glimpses of the interior reveal curious objects that seem to have their own mysterious character.
I’m interested in photography’s inability to tell a complete story, drawn to its silent language, fragmented nature, and the evocative space that lies between. In this body of work I put together the fragments like pieces of a puzzle to create a world that evokes a sense of place, mystery, and psychology through a personal point of view. The accumulation of images come together to form something more fictional – – more about the way a place is seen, than the place itself. I’m drawn to the intuitive and subconscious impulse to make a photograph.
I approach the fragments like one might approach interpreting images in dreams: trying to decipher the repetition of elements, and what that might suggest about a symbolic meaning entangled with the maker. The animals have become my messengers or doppelgangers, light and color are lyrical and psychological threads, and I am the protagonist, caught in my own cryptic web.
The title of the series carries a double meaning- – at once the photographs suggest the unraveling of a day (or days), with the subjects themselves flawed, unstable, imperfect.
Or is it that these scavenged fractures paradoxically reflect and reveal my own precarious undoing?”
To view more of Chelsea’s work, please visit her website.