Chelsea Welsh

Chelsea Welsh is a photographer from Walbridge, Ohio. She received her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013, and a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2009. She lives and works in Cambridge, MA as the Residence Director of a transitional group home for adults with mental illness.

View more of Chelsea's work here

Disquiet Statement

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
-Wallace Stevens

For me, the physical act of wandering evokes a psychological wandering. Much of my work is influenced by writers and poets, using the landscape or everyday objects as metaphors that reflect a more interior state. Paradoxically, 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. I think of myself as a character caught in a narrative behind the fragments of images: using the animals, the light, and the suburban plant life as my compass to getting lost. . The photographs are visual contemplations. I put together the fragments like pieces of a puzzle, trying to understand my own psychology and obsessions through the external world. The accumulation of these disjointed images come together to form a world that is more fictional, as it becomes more about the way a place is seen by a particular character, than the place itself. The animals are my messengers or doppelgangers, light and color become more of a lyrical thread, accentuating the changing moods of the landscape. The still lives of hair, being the most personal, represent my own undoing throughout this elusive and obsessive search.

I’m a wanderer caught in the day’s unraveling.