Grace Flott
As a classically trained painter with disfigurement and chronic pain I document and complicate what it means to “look different” by remixing European narrative painting frameworks with embodied modes of printmaking. Raised in white suburban America, I spent my youth striving toward normalcy in all its forms until I experienced a major biographical disruption due to injury that placed my body firmly outside of mainstream media representation.
Daily I confront external perceptions of myself as either ‘normal’ or ‘other’ and I am not aligned firmly with disabled nor non-disabled identity, but rather occupy a liminal corporeality common to living with a visible difference. I resist reductive categorization and resurrect this in-betweeness from erasure and stigma by orienting my practice toward body liberation.
Through inclusive portraiture, narrative painting and printmaking, I illuminate physical difference as a dynamic identity and trouble cultural binaries like abled/disabled, grotesque/beautiful, and pain/pleasure. Ultimately my work reprises art historical representations of women and socially challenged bodies in combination with disability culture and my personal symbology in order to create safety and belonging for all bodies.
In doing so I touch on topics like performance, ritual, intimacy, invisibility/hyper-visibility, objectification and consumerism.