ABOUT

Lydia Marie T. is a mixed media sculptor and sound artist from Philadelphia, currently studying for her bachelors in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her sculptures explore the transformation of calamitous subjects into vibrant emotive forms- often including references to her face and body, repetition and distortion of a personal archive of imagery, and an affinity towards animals and organic materials. Her music follows the same attempt at transfiguration- converting unfortunate transient feelings into highly expressive, purgative musical arrangements and song. 

My work largely centers around transformation- transformation of the morose, the abstract presence of thoughts and memories, and the undesirable into palpable objects and affective moments of listening. I feel that it comes from a lack of control- a helplessness towards feeling deeply and remembering deeply, and it is by channeling this fact of life that I find meaning and can generate instances of beauty. 

I seek to extract and collage fragments from my internal world with external experiences to both mimic life and create new channels for morbidity to be reinvented. I repurpose discarded or unorthodox materials into sculptural forms- fusing my imagined with my observed, sometimes tragic reality. Oftentimes my own face and body slip into the making, or whatever soft and precious  thing I am presently enamored with- cats, birds, flowers, tree branches, myself as a child, etc.

 My music pursues a parallel avenue to my three dimensional works- I source from a deep well of my own unresolved emotions and circumstances, and reconstruct them into concrete and cathartic records. Honesty and earnestness, sometimes to the extreme, is my desired result. Something I feel is inexplicable happens when an ephemeral feeling is captured- to be re-experienced again and again, listened to and felt until it has passed, and from then on exists as an archive of the soul. 

My primary objective and belief is that by sharing the hyper-specific, vulnerable ordeals of my life, I can create moments of connection with those who encounter my artwork, and between my collective works as a whole.