May Broadley

My work seeks out comfort irrespective of emotional discomforts. I am inspired by upholstered interiors of spaces where individuals tend to feel comfortable: a therapist’s office or a bedroom. My work spans many stages of reconciling with my own emotions: red hand-written text desperately scrawled on mirrors - my self-directed frustration at not ‘getting better’. I also employ the impersonal visual language of the email and filling them with painfully personal information, followed by desperate artistic layers of redaction. My ritualistic method of creating in My Rug and My Body of Rugs constructs objects that explore my complex relationship with sitting with my own emotions. Through my intentional artistic methods and focus on private spaces, I delve into the helplessness of the solitary experience of struggling with complex emotions.
The careful replication of my own therapist’s office present in My Rug and The Purple Chair draws upon familiar, upholstered textures and colours in order to offer myself and others a sense of reassurance. The visible brush-strokes and my body sanded into the chair serve as reminders to the audience that they are not as alone in their struggle as they feel. My acts of replication are a record of lengthy emotional labour ‘adding colour’ to objects. I work with Textiles and my body in My Body of Rugs and inflict methods of creation culturally coded as ‘masculine’ such as guns and clippers. Employing these symbols, then imprinting my female body into them and coating their bottoms with latex. Resultantly, I generate tension between each rug’s composite parts, coding these objects with their own complexities that align with my own. By exposing invisible labour, revealing vulnerability and combining historically gendered media and methods of creation, I communicate the complexity of emotional struggle with not one cause but many, spanning the intimately personal to shaped by broader societal structures. I hope to create work that urges individual contemplation, giving those viewing permission to feel; to destigmatise your own emotions and normalise discussions surrounding mental health. Experimenting with balancing vulnerability and self-protection, my art becomes a safe place to reflect and heal, for both myself and the audience.