Today, coming to the end of our submissions, I introduce Chelsea Welsh. Her work resides in exploration, while also finding the joy of getting lost in familiar places. Setting out with no prior plans or desires, Chelsea is led from place to place based purely on visual satisfaction. As the viewer, she guides us on a walkabout, pointing out specific oddities or marks of beauty that we would never discover on our own. These photographs become documentation of the new discoveries from her everyday.

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

caught in the days unraveling

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 triggers a psychological wandering.  In caught in the days unraveling, I find myself in a narrative behind the images. I use the animals, the light, and the suburban plant life as my compass to getting lost.  The photographs are visual meditations, subtle discoveries found in small corners of neighborhoods or homes.  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.  In this body of work I put together the fragments like pieces of a puzzle to create a world that evokes a sense of place, mystery, and psychology. The accumulation of images come together to form a world that is more fictional, as it is more about the way a place is seen, than the place itself. I’m interested in what things may suggest, yet not reveal.  The wandering leads me on an elliptical journey. The animals have become my messengers or doppelgängers, light and color are lyrical and psychological threads, and I, the protagonist, finding myself lost and illuminated, as I scavenge among the fractured poetry of the everyday.