Derriann Pharr (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist who uses an array of media to investigate themes of identity, belonging, and abjection of the human body. Pharr will earn her BFA from The University of Alabama at Birmingham and is currently based in the central region of the state. Previous exhibitions include the Gadsden Museum of Art and Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.

Her current work deals with the push and pull of transforming self. The beliefs she holds about personhood are heavily informed by a hyper-awareness of surroundings as a little girl; the work is both a celebration and ceremony of healing from intergenerational traumas and triumphs passed to her. Documenting her transition into womanhood has been reliant on a necessary examination and collapse of these beliefs, a freedom chosen to pursue alchemizing and combining mixed media practices in an attempt to mend relationships with self.

At the surface level, the artist confronts contemporary Eurocentric ideas of beauty and desirability. Both the physical and internal magnificence of marginalized bodies are widely ignored in the south, leaving minority groups with minimal space to feel seen. Feelings of discontent in regard to physicalness have propelled the artist to cope through the act of escapism itself, and naturally led to solace in realities only possible through the creation of art. Choosing to draw bodies without the natural form in mind allows them to exist away from the constraints placed upon her own.

This found freedom in redefining the human figure allows further play and curiosity throughout creative processes. Building a work begins by constructing the “bones” of the surface; gestural marks—reminiscent of eyes, limbs, genitalia, therianthropic forms, and foliage—are placed onto the grounds initially. The work is truly born as color and texture are negotiated through a meditative transformation of pushing materials against one another to reveal how media can become cohesive, or deconstruct, as they meet. This combination of soft and hard, gritty and smooth, saturated and muted, is reflective of the myriad facets of human existence that work together to form a person’s soul and identity.