Triggered: Elizabeth Hibbard
Jamie , 2019. © Elizabeth Hibbard
The image in question, I made in the middle of my first year of graduate school here at Yale. After spending my entire life in Northern California, the transition to the east, to school, posed new challenges for the subject matter as an artist who has a strong sense of place and the personal. This lead to me working almost exclusively out of my apartment through the winter. I was grasping for any semblance of familiarity in even a constructed kind of domesticity. This image was one of many involving iodine at the time. The color's ability to refer to something abject and soiled, while being a material that serves to anesthetize the body from invasion feels very evocative of many of the concepts on my mind around permeability. Mixed with milk, I was thinking about nourishment and enmeshment.
My refrigerator in my apartment was broken and leaking, and I periodically would step into a cold puddle in the night. Inevitably the leaky fridge found it's way into my psyche and work. I often integrate family photographs and vernacular imagery in the installation of my work, so this felt like a natural step to include it in the frame. The image is of a baby with a vacuum hose to its mouth; again, permeability, leaking, cleanliness, reproduction are all themes that weave throughout this series as I continue to work on it.
Check out more of Elizabeth Hibbard’s work here.
