Artist Statement:

My name is Samantha Wigglesworth, I am this year's Artist in Residence with Arts North East. The idea for this show titled, Vulnerably Visible, came from the fact that each person has many different versions of themselves. Some of these sides you are willing to share with everyone, others only to a select few. I feel as though portraiture can be a window into these unseen sides. Through my recent exploration of my own mental health and rediscovering things about me personally, my goal with this series was that I wanted to explore some of the different facets of myself. I wanted to be truly vulnerable and when creating these works and to do so I really had to push myself to be comfortable in the uncomfortable by creating depictions ranging from “Anxiety” and “Sensory” to “Bubbly”. Through the use of only colored lighting I stripped away my base identity and brought forward a new way to emphasise these versions and perceptions of myself. I feel it is important for me to do this as a portrait artist first before I ask my models to show me their vulnerabilities.

I have worked on building many different skills through this body of work, one of which was to get me back into doing my own photography, and who would be a more willing model than yourself. To first photograph vulnerabilities is a difficult thing, even though it was just me in a room by myself. I wanted these works to be as authentic as possible so every expression of negative emotion was true. Photographing these negative emotions was not the hard part however, painting them and sitting with them for approximately the 40 hours each one took me to complete was difficult. Both painting and knowing that these hidden sides of myself will be seen was the most challenging thing, but it felt important to create an honest depiction that others might relate to and see themselves in.