I’ve had a vested interest in making art about rooms and how we can tell a lot about people based on what their rooms look like. My conference piece is called “Honeytrap,” and in creating this piece, I was trying to focus on seeing if I could maintain the line between chaos and control at the same time as trying to subconsciously draw the audience into the piece, into my room, where I often find myself getting lured into and stuck in. What it could be like to be bedridden because you physically cannot make yourself get out of your incredibly comfortable bed.
The bed in my piece is clearly the centerpiece of this installation, as the piece’s setting is a bedroom and it’s the first thing your eye is drawn to when approaching the piece. The “bed frame” itself is a pedestal laying on its side, the mattress consists of a large selection of my own clothes, which I raided from my closet and the bins of my worn-just-once-so-I-won’t-wash-them-yet clothes and piled onto the pedestal. Then there are stuffed animals from my own bedroom lining my bed the same way I usually have them set up in my room and my old comforter covering my bed. Around my bed I have pictures of me and my friends on the walls, again, the same way I have it in my bedroom, along with a few strings of fairy lights, a moon my best friend got me for my birthday and a yellow wooden flower picture. My bed is supposed to come off as appealing and comfortable, somewhere the viewer would think was a cozy place to curl up, because that’s what it is! And that’s the trap I constantly find myself falling into in my own bedroom. Even when sitting on my “bed” in my “room” while working on this piece, I found myself being tempted to get stuck on that bed the same way I normally end up getting stuck on my normal bed.
On the floor next to my bed is my “bed stand” (aka my stool) and another assortment of things you would normally find in my room: my keychain, cigarette cartons, a massive pile of receipts, pictures I’ve been meaning to hang on my walls, papers, notebooks, tchotchkes and figurines, a photo of both my mom and my dad when they were younger, books, stuffed animals, video games and movies, candy and snacks, anything and everything I may need. Even my garbage bags are right next to my bed so I don’t have to get out of bed to throw something out! The spacing of everything pretty much revolving around my bed is because I purposely try to bring all of my possibly needed items as close to me in my bed as possible so I don’t have to get out of my incredibly comfortable bed to get something; that’s how entrapped I become in my bed when I’m curled up in it. This habit is called “nesting,” and it perfectly describes the way I need to make myself feel as comfortable in my space as possible. The way all of my items on the floor are placed is how they randomly and messily fall into place. By positioning my items like this, not only am I replicating what my actual room is like, but I’m creating a scene for the viewer that if they were imagining themselves in my piece, in my room, they would have practically everything they might need, which means no need to leave ever, even if you wanted to get up to go do something. My shoes being part of this piece is almost ironic; you have the ability to leave this room, but do you really want to?
- Me in my room!!
- I don’t really have any pictures of this piece developing, since I made it the same way I’ve made a lot of my pieces, which is almost all at once.
- I was incredibly inspired by Tracey Emin’s “My Bed;” the perfect capturing of personal but precision is beautiful, and I want to make more art like that piece.
