Shot Magazine 14 | Interview with Artist Aleah Chaplin

Aleah Chapin is a visual artist from Seattle, USA, who has been painting human bodies to question, reconsider, reimagine and subvert their traditional role in western culture. Female bodies in particular are portrayed as they are dancing, laughing, interfolding, embracing each other, to explore the notions of aging, gender and beauty as we see them genuinely unfold before our eye, balanced within a misty landscape, against the backdrop of a forest or amongst dragonflies. Aleah’s early paintings depict natural bodies that recount their own stories, that become expressions of the forces of life, as opposed to the values through which we are taught to understand them in our contemporary society. Her most recent works stand in stark contrast with the immaculate realism of the previous, representing a radical shift inwards to a more abstract, emotional, psychological dimension. This conceptual understanding of living within a body, of finding a way home to ourselves, was prompted by the turbulent times that have shaken our world in the last years, thus leading the artist to seek for greater meaning in a visual language that relies on colours, shapes and feelings, putting forth a more comprehensive and universal message. Nonetheless, throughout her works, Aleah Chapin consistently invites new conversations on the same question: what does it mean to exist within a body today?

Aleah Chapin Shot Magazine Interview Issue 14

Aleah, how did it all begin? What drew you to art and inspired you to become an artist?

Art has always felt like breathing. Not because it’s easy, but because it is so much a part of who I am. So I could say it started because I was born. I could also say it started because I was born to an artist mother (Deborah Koff-Chapin) who was creating work during her labour as she gave birth to me, and has been a working artist for 50 years. The very act of taking paint and layering it on canvas, the time and focus that goes into this, and how these materials and actions create something bigger than the sum of its parts is pure magic. I can’t imagine living a life where creativity is not at the center. It is how I process what it means to be living in a body on this earth.

Your early works are mainly dedicated to the representation of aging and female bodies, immersed in natural landscapes. These paintings speak of the female condition, of profound connections to nature, shared experience and solidarity. What led you to this choice? Can these paintings be read as a response to the current role of femininity in our society?

Yes, they can absolutely be read as a response to the world we live in and how women have been represented. But to be entirely honest, that was not how they began. They all started from something very familiar to any artist, and human, really: a crisis. I was in graduate school at the New York Academy of Art, and the Aunties Project, as I would end up calling it, sprouted from a profound struggle in finding my voice. I was on the subway, my mind wrestling with the question of “who am I as an artist, and what do I have to say?” when the idea of painting my mom and her friends, the very foundation of my life and identity, fell into me. And so this became my thesis project, and over the next decade, it grew into something so much bigger than I could have imagined. Even though this chapter of my creative life has mostly drawn to an end, the work is still out there, expanding and challenging rigid expectations that have been put on women for generations, and I am proud to be a part of that.

These more abstract, conceptual paintings appear to reflect a deeper search for bodily meaning. What prompted this move inwards? Would you say they are related to a shift in your thinking about bodies and identity?

Early in 2020, around the beginning of lockdown in the United States, I started doing these automatic, intuitive drawings with paint on paper, often with my non- dominant hand. I didn’t know this would be the beginning of such a profound shift in my work; I just knew that there was something inside of me had to come out. Looking back, I can see clearly that this was a time when my understanding of the experience of being alive was expanding. I had spent practically my entire life training my eyes and hands to work together to express the physical world around me as accurately as possible, but now, something was shifting. I was becoming more aware of all the unseen but deeply felt realities of being alive that could not be painted in a literal way. The world shutting down gave me the space to explore this, the isolation pushed me inward, and so the series Walking Backwards was born and exploded the way in which I allow myself to paint.

Your recent works explore one’s relationship to the body in a more individual, solitary way. Do you believe this has helped you understand something about yourself, or about what it means to have a body in our times?

The bodies we are born into dictate so much of the life we will live and opportunities we are given. Being born male and white is different than being born female and brown. And also, I believe that beneath these external identities there is something universal that connects us all. This work has been about going inward into my own experience of this dichotomy between physical and energetic identity. For the first time, I used my own body as a reference. The automatic drawings, springing from my own inner experiences and sensations, were the seed of each piece. I think looking inward instead of out has deepened my understanding of myself, and since this is the only viewpoint I can portray with absolute honesty, it has also expanded my empathy for all of us in this world because it has connected me with something deeper than my physical form.

In your most recent series (2020-2021), your bodies are waking, prodding, protecting, enfolding, unearthing. What do these different phases represent?

Quite simply, these paintings are a mirror of my experiences as I was creating them. The expansion my perception was going through was vivid, but not always easy. There were times where I felt like I was purging old beliefs; about myself, my identity as an artist and as a person who experiences the world through a white female body. I was prodding my inner walls and unearthing things I cannot put into words. This series is a reflection of the messy, beautiful, complex process of personal growth.

How does this new artistic language relate to the experience of having a female body? Do you believe this offers a more human, universalistic message?

The fact that they utilize the representation of a female body is only because I live in, and identify with, a female body. I believe we all have masculine and feminine aspects to us, and it is on this understanding that our healing as a society rests. I believe part of femininity in any of us is an ability to encompass a wide range of emotions, identities and layers of being. It is about holding space for this complexity and being vulnerable with our insides, seeing this as something that makes us stronger, not weaker. These things can be universal experiences, however we identify and whatever body we are born into. The paintings, both in their subject and the contrasting styles they are painted in, embody these ideas.

What is womanhood, to you?

Womanhood is being open to life changing us, while always staying rooted in ourselves. It is the trust that in our going inward, we expand out. It is the deep knowing that although we may revel in being the flower, who we really are is the sun and rain that courses through the petals, and when they wilt and fall back to the earth, we have only come home to ourselves.

More interesting

Maïmouna Guerresi

In her works, the Italian-Senegalese artist Maïmouna Guerresi portrays the sacred nature of humanity by merging influences from her own personal ancestry and a plurality of cultures. Particularly inspired by Islam and Sufi mysticism, Maïmouna draws from these philosophies to represent messages that are universal in nature, as they appeal to human spirituality devoid of any particular localism, through bare backgrounds, giant figures and plain robes. With simple beauty, she delves into the realm of religion and mystique accompanied by an elegant and graceful language which she developed throughout her artistic development in the Veneto region of Italy. In her works, Maïmouna elevates the human condition to one of spiritual being, of symbolic meaning, of profound understanding.

Hanan Roz

With the delicate and elegant silhouettes of these bodies, fluctuating as ghosts in cages of wire mesh, the expectations that are constantly put on women’s bodies are challenged in a radical yet subtle manner. Hanan Roz, the Lebanese artist and creator of this collection of sculptures, here explores the hidden dichotomies of toughness and fragility, beauty and pain, expectations and reality, both in their material and symbolic forms. By incorporating her personal experience as a woman into the process of creating these delicate yet arduous bodies, she explores the meaning of femininity and beauty, thus offering the viewer a sense of this journey. Hands are reaching out from skins made of wire, whilst headless and limbless bodies sensually dance within their invisible nets. Each sculpture incarnates a diverse expression of the feminine body, shedding light on its metaphysical structures, its innate diversity, its beautiful strength.

Sepideh Salehi

As a brave, bold and elegant artist, Sepideh Salehi has been merging various visual languages and processes to explore the notions of home, family and cultural history. Born in Teheran, Iran, Sepideh’s artwork is profoundly soaked in her experience as a young Iranian woman during the authoritarian regime of the Islamic state, which has institutionalised the segregation of women and men, to this day, in what is now known as gender apartheid. The concepts of covering up, hiding and privacy have thus underpinned the layers of collage, photography, painting, printmaking, calligraphy that the artist has combined to explore the relationship between the inner and outer vision of female identity. As well as this, Sepideh is interested in exploring how one’s environment, memories, belonging may be intertwined with their personal narratives to reimagine realities and propose new visions. In the obscured faces of her photographic collages, such as the iconic Mohr Portrait, the connection between identity, landscape and unknown is dissected and reconfigured to understand how women are wrongly perceived in their society and to question how the female self-perception is conditioned by its environment. As a sign of protest, her faces are covered, unrevealed, obscured from the viewer to allow for their identity to mature in secret. For this reason, Sepideh merges post-1979 Teheran cultural history with elements of her own past, in order to depict the struggles of female oppression against the injustice of abusive political regime, and to bring together a new, unknown gaze beneath the layers of one’s identity.

Cristina Mittermeier

The dusky pink trio of feeding flamingos, the ethereal vision of a lonely humpback whale or the current of a colourful shoal of fish are only some of the rich collection of photographs that Cristina “Mitty” Mittermeier has caught and brought back to land from the depths of the natural world. With her talent and profound ecological sensibility, Cristina has become one of the leading nature photographer of our day and has co-founded SeaLegacy, a global agency for the ocean aiming to bring together climate action and sustainable solutions by supporting scientific endeavours and conservation strategies. In her explorations of both the natural and human realms, Cristina attempts to bridge these worlds through her photography, in an attempt to instil awe and convey the beauty of ecologies that are often distant and unseen. In this interview, she tells us about how her relationship to the natural environment has developed, how her journey as a woman has affected her works, and how we must understand how much is enough in order to find harmony with our wounded and depleted earth. It all starts with a sense of enough.

Kimiko Yoshida

Hiding beneath masks of identity, searching for absence, circulating in the layers of time, culture, custom: Kimiko Yoshida explores the nature of being oneself, whilst letting go of all that is attached to this notion. By covering her gaze with drapes, masks or emblems, she becomes one with her background and the elements adorning her being, thus learning to question what it means to be an individual, to dress oneself with an identity. Her self-portraits serve to present a collection of photographs where the environment and subject are always the same, yet constantly portray something alien to itself. There is in fact a gap between the representation and signification of these images, where identity is captured as a static object that is able to transform, deflect, convert or recast itself in various ways, to the point of becoming no longer recognisable. Born in Tokyo, Kimiko was formed in Japan until 1995, when she decided to keep pursuing her academic career as artist and photographer in Paris. Through her examination of identity and her depictions of its illusion, Kimiko is able to raise essential questions around the female identity and, in the words of Rimbaud, “find strange, unfathomable, repugnant, delicious things”. Indeed by letting go of the dominance of our ego, we will take these things in, we will understand.

Mary Sibande

Mary Sibande is a multidisciplinary artist from South Africa, who has dedicated much of her creative practice to unearthing her personal, as well as cultural history. Born and raised during the last decade of the apartheid era in South Africa, her creative practice was profoundly conditioned by the important historical changes she experienced first-hand in the years prior and following the segregation of black people on behalf of the country’s white minority government. Governed by the theme of colour and its emotional connotations, the artist’s works have travelled through phases and continue to explore the possibilities that colour offers as an expression of both racial and emotional meaning. Through her sculptures and photography, Mary Sibande has delved into the history of her own female forebearers to bring back to the surface images of a collective history of black female bodies that was previously buried beneath layers of discrimination, unfreedom and injustice. By weaving these threads together, she has brought these women’s lost perspectives, abandoned ambitions and forgotten narratives to the present, in a way that will be able to also inform the fabric of the future.

Odile Decq

By taking the discipline of architecture to its creative extremes, Odile Decq is renowned for her whimsical and cutting-edge projects that attempt to reimagine space and what is possible to create within this. As an architect, urban planner and academic, Odile Decq merges her bold creative language with the surrounding environment to create buildings that radically reconceptualise the relationships between human life and space. Particularly in the male dominated field of architecture, she has broken boundaries both due to her creative intuition and her struggle as a woman in this environment, thus proving to the younger generation that daring to dream is, indeed, the only way to change reality for the better. In this interview, we have the pleasure of speaking to the founder of Studio Odile Decq.

SHOT | Article Aleah Chapin

Aleah Chapin

Home to Ourselves