Derek Charleton

Background

About Derek Charleton

My name is Derek Charleton, and I am a Bachelor of Fine Arts student at the University of Delaware. My art for the past year has been about reflecting on dark and corrupted experiences in my life of the world around me. I’ve been trying to tackle issues in the feelings of depression that I have experienced. There is always a story and always an experience I want to share, and personal struggles and conflicts I want others to understand through my art. I believe that putting the viewer in space makes them feel uncomfortable and anxious, allowing some self-interpretation of the emotion behind the art and understanding the experiences through that. I am attracted to various different mediums styles, although 3D modeling, 3D printing, and steel sculpture have always been my main mediums. I do also enjoy other mediums such as painting, drawing on the side, outside of sculpture, and 3D work. I also work with video to incorporate different mediums into my sculptural work, to heighten the experience of certain pieces. I found sculpture and other three-dimensional mediums to be interesting and fun to work with throughout my time as an artist, and since then found it to be the best way I can express myself. I find steel sculpture work is particularly great to work with being able to create more scratchy and sketchy-looking figures. Ultimately I am able to utilize steel sculpture to make an interesting subject matter in the surrounding space with details, color, and texture which I find really fun. I am drawn to surreal and nightmarish subject matters that either connect to my past in some way, draw from my fears, and from an interest in strange and uncanny liminal aesthetics. In extension, my work is mostly surrealism, which is defined as “a rational vision of life combined with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” I also find that the subject matter from my art ends up becoming some sort of strange object or figure alienating a space as if it wasn’t there before and doesn’t belong. The goal concerning my work, whether it is sculpture or painting, is the effect of experiencing something unnerving, uncanny, unsettling imagery created from a somewhat surrealistic setting or subject matter. I create artwork to describe how I feel about the world around me. I want people to understand what can be learned through being uncomfortable, and what you can overcome when you are set in that uncomfortable position. Whether it is art or a real-life experience, appreciating and understanding your fears is the next step toward overcoming them.