Artist Statement, Tera Peters

Shown: It’s Not a Butterfly,            See What You Want to See,              Scrub Scrub

My artwork tends to stem from a mix of my core beliefs, my personal aesthetic interests, and my most prominent feelings or emotions of the time. Most often my work has visibly a grungy, raw, dark, and even macabre or eerie vibe about it. I find this style to be very aesthetically attractive, not only in my art, but in my personal style in fashion as well. I see the epitome of my being as very ironic because the way I look (in a fashion sense) tends to lead people to assume my personality and actions are those vastly different to reality. So, upon looking at this body of work I created, know, I am not a malevolent person. I am not a reckless troublemaker (quite the opposite believe it or not). I do not “need to find Jesus.” I am not a miserable, poor soul. I assure you, yes, I am okay.

My overall feeling when creating this group of work was that I was making a mess. I was lost or directionless if you will. I had my many doubts, seeming to cycle between negative and positive reinforcement within my own head throughout. At first, this made me very frustrated and feel like maybe I wasn’t ready for this whole “being an artist” thing, but I have come to realize that this is and really always has been part of my creative process. I must fail and fail again until I have become so failed out that I have nothing left to do but start to win. Your work always starts out lacking worth, in creating it is when you as an artist make it worthy of being created. 

This project as a whole felt extremely chaotic to me while working on it. I thought my lack of a precise path was sort of leading me straight towards disaster. The feeling of being aimless and doing nothing but digging further and further from direction was intense. By the end though, I found its purpose. It found its own purpose really, and that was showing me and hopefully you, that sometimes your initial reaction to something may be false. All hope is never gone unless you box it in to be. The world is way to unimaginatively complex to be so certain about any particular thing and to think things are concretely as you see them right now. Thinking they could never change might be a bit ignorant, isn’t it? So, while this project may seem dark and somber upon first glance, you must look deeper into its soul and you’ll find its light. A true reflection of myself really. I now realize this is a collection of self-portraits, each work representing a little piece of me. A study on how sometimes I lose myself only to find myself again. Now the work has its worth.

Moreover, my main goal in making art is not necessarily for people to enjoy the aesthetic (visual) style of it, I do not seek to please everyone. My aim is to make people question it, for it to provoke thoughts and emotions, to be remembered, and in the end, to have some sort of positive impact even if that be as small as making someone smile.