Bio

Chris Mott graduated from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a BFA in Photography in 2021. She is currently located in Berks County, PA where she creates out of a home studio. She is making works in photography, painting, ceramics, and sculpture that combine a sense of nostalgia, personal history, and experiences with themes of family, time, and memory.

Artist Statement

Emerging from an appreciation of what photography can preserve despite the ever present passing of time, my work utilizes both my own photographs and images collected from family archives as materials in collaborations with one another that honor a feeling of reminiscence, body, and memory.

Largely I work through photography while also incorporating other mediums such as painting and sculpting. My eyes see the world through photographs and compositions. When I begin a piece, it will often stem from a photograph or manifest as a photo in my mind when I start to plan the work. I implement other methods and materials because regardless what medium I start out with, my mind desires it to hold hands with another. Multiplicity and flexibility to cross mediums is important to create end results that express what I want the piece to say.

The subject of my work focuses on combining sentimentality and nostalgia, my end goal is always a sense of understanding and individual interpretation by the audience, whether it’s what I intended that meaning to be or not. To me, art is important when it can be viewed and have meaning to people even if they don’t relate to the exact moment or memory the piece is about. Implementing sentimentality into my works has the ability to not only change that piece for the viewer, but to influence them through their own empathy and shared experiences.

My goal is to create from specific experiences in my own life, but give a sensitivity with my art that can reach a broader audience. Themes like family, loss, the human form, and time are recurring in my work. I have the desire to express myself through these themes and mediums so I can create art to work through experiences and thoughts of my own.