Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily Potts.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Emily. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I think everyone is an artist as a child when you are young expression is intuitive and the blinders of institutional structures are not yet set. There is a real sense of freedom and the fear and force in appeasing this big other is not even an available concept as a child. I am inspired by the people that just kept doing art since they were children and never stopped. I feel like I am just not coming back on this path. About six years ago, I was a runner on the Texas State Cross Country team and a nutrition major. I believed my dream was to become a marathon runner and sports nutritionist. It was very much a strict and regimented lifestyle that I had created for myself throughout high school and a bit of undergraduate. I was not making art at all and felt very out of touch with myself and very empty and frustrated. Thinking back on it, I was trying to control myself, control myself so much that there was no room for art. So much tension was building up inside during these years that it built up into a very opposite reaction into something out of control, creating a mind space that allows for the gesture and play since this release, art happened naturally and has guided much of my decisions up until now. I am currently in the middle of my first year as an art graduate student in the sculpture program at UNT and feel very true to myself and confident that I am in the right place.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It is not a smooth road but the road I am on right now feels at least like the right one. I feel that I am heading to the place I need to be and feel less lost. I know that this road is not a straight trajectory to an ideal artist lifestyle; it will twist and turn until the day I die. But the twist turns and moments of doubt of feeling lost are moments of transition and introspection for me. I feel this strong pull towards art and toward telling a story to people so when it feels of course, it only informs the story. I think that art and storytelling is a way of me fighting back doubt. It is funny where there are these coincidental moments of feeling that what I am doing is valid and that the fear of failure is not where the story ends but where the story has room to begin.
We’d love to hear more about your art.
Art is something for everyone. There is a universal need for connection and relation to others that is not always met with language. I feel that a lot of experience of the human condition cannot be fully expressed by words or traditional story telling. While my art is rooted in an imagined story and narrative it is. However, a story that unfolds in on itself that is not planned but is found. I feel like I’m exploring my own vulnerabilities and paranoid feelings of the human condition just as much as I hope viewers to contemplate their own ideas of fear. Art allows for interpretation and I want to place people into a sense of a predicament and ominous feeling that can only be encountered through what the viewer’s own anxieties and vulnerabilities they bring with them when viewing my work. I also am interested in exploring the difference between high and low art and what makes something accessible to everyone. I feel like my work is different in the way I express; my aesthetic has a real loose quality to it in a gesture that I feel like is very much my own.
What were you like growing up?
I think I have always been drawn to art even when I wasn’t making it, and I’m very interested in the expression of art in different mediums, especially stand-up comedy and dark humor. I have always been drawn to people that laugh at the contradictions of life when I was growing up, I much more strict with myself and reserved and have learned to loosen up a little more in my early adult life and be a little more outgoing.
Contact Info:
- Address: 900 Kilkenny Court Apt B
Denton, Tx 76210 - Website: Pottsart.com
- Phone: 713-614-3325
- Email: emilypotts@my.unt.edu
- Instagram: @freespiral_
Image Credit:
Thomas Petty tpetty.com
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