Chelsea Silbereis
Compassionating – 2023
I love the crush of these children. I’ll just lie on the ground purely for the thrill of feeling them climb me and press me down hard. It feels like full-body contentment, right up until it gets too close. Then it feels like drowning. As a result, I move between availability, aloofness, and irritability even though compassionating continuously is my goal.
Compassionating explores the tension I experience creating a healthy emotional life for my kids over my background of childhood and generational trauma. I pick up my camera when I’m on the brink of these changeable mood states and I photograph our everyday.
When the emotions get to be too much we turn to the landscape to try and regulate. I see my experience played out in intimate natural scenes: existential dread in the fluff from a milkweed pod, hope in a crisp line of illuminated water along the edge of a late fall berry, the twists and turns of failing and trying again in the gnarls of an old stump.
The resulting series of photographs are built into a handmade book with interactive components that invite the viewer to handle the pages and the photos themselves. The inevitable imprint of their handling feels like my inevitable imprint on my kids; no matter how careful I am, I will leave unintended marks.
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- patience
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- in between me
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- you’re the only one you can lift you
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- bridging
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- trifecta of awkward mothering
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- healing touch(tactics)
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- sometimes, happiness
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- thinking both thoughts(dying and loving)
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- healing touch(existential dread)
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- healing touch(corporeal sickness)
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- drip, drip
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- healing touch(four generations)
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- Alice (four generations)
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- practice
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- healing touch(whether you want to or not)
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- emergence
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- a sadness of the skin
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- healing touch(of water)
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- healing touch(comfort)
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- try(try again)
About
Chelsea Silbereis is a photographer exploring themes of family and domestic life, intimacy, and generational trauma living and working near Boston, MA. Chelsea has had a non-traditional photography education including many internet-based photography workshops, having a photographer parent, and self-directed study of 20th-century photographers.
Her photos have appeared in group exhibitions at The Curated Fridge, PhotoPlace Gallery and she is a current Boston Center for the Arts Resident.
Chelsea’s commissioned work involves embedding with families to document their real life with an unfiltered and heartfelt lens.
She lives with her husband, 2 kids, a dog and a cat in Belmont, MA and likes to imagine the ghosts of pets past are also members of the household.