Once you’ve flipped through the pages of Shae Detar’s debut monograph, Another World, the front cover feels like the only possible entry point into her fascinating universe. The deep irises of a child’s eye are highlighted by rainbow brushstrokes that speak to her wide-eyed curiosity for the world around her.
For the model-turned-artist, creating is all about being in the moment. “Whenever I start working on a new piece, I put myself in the headspace of a child and think about how children would approach the same process,” Shae says of the vision that convinced her to choose an old picture of her niece Sakura as the cover. “Rather than overthinking things or judging the end result, kids sit down and create, taking in all the joy that comes with it,” she says. Born and bred in Pennsylvania, in a small town just over an hour away from her current home of New York City, the artist spent her childhood running around in the woods with her siblings.
“Because my mom had a rough upbringing, both her and my dad did everything they could to make our childhood magical,” she says, stressing how, through her work, she strives to revive the otherworldly atmosphere of those years. When not romping about in nature, Shae was found playing dress-up in her room, acting out scenes from her spirited imagination or scripts from her favourite films. “I used to transcribe entire scripts while watching movies, pressing pause and rewinding them — pre-internet days! — until I had every single word down.” From collecting vintage clothing and costumes to working in theatre, modelling, and graphic and fashion design, her journey into making art was led by the scientific principle of trial and error: an idea which, even today, continues to inform her practice.
“I was obviously searching for something that I hadn’t found yet,” she says, thinking back to her years interning at Zac Posen’s eponymous label, before running her own vintage shop and ultimately finding photography, via a passion for blogging, in 2007. “Photography opened up a whole world to me,” Shae explains. “It was like seeing for the first time: suddenly, my eyes could spot shadows, forms and details I had never noticed before, granting me new ways to express what lay inside of me.” Relying on photographs as “a base layer to build from”, today the artist transforms her shots with watercolours, acrylics and charcoal, which she applies directly onto her blown-up prints, following nothing but a gut feeling. “My favourite part of what I do is being in the studio, printing out an image and experimenting with it without really knowing what that will lead to,” she says.
Key to Shae’s aesthetic is her love of collage, another medium she fell for as a teenager, along with that of all things printed matter: art and painting books, artists’ biographies and “the edgy magazines I would find in the East Village in the 90s,” she says. While heavily influenced by the use of colour by pioneering painters such as Giotto, Vermeer, Bosch, Tintoretto and Titian; and drawing on the work of groundbreaking women artists like Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Yayoi Kusama, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo; the self-taught artist’s work is fundamentally grounded in her inclination towards the tactile. “I love working with my hands, building wooden panels to mount my pieces to, and adding wax, epoxy resin and varnish,” she says. “I am a sucker for handmade things: in an ever-advancing technological world, it feels comforting to still find pleasure in making physical pieces.”
Published by Skeleton Key Press and launching on 21 March, Another World is just as experiential. A reaction to “the sexual and body shaming narratives” that were instilled in Shae from a very young age, the photobook sees her reappropriate her understanding of the feminine and its physical, sensual and spiritual connotations against the preaching of the Evangelical Purity Movement. Having gained prominence in 90s America, the Christian group condemned sex as “immoral” and “sinful”, urging youth members to repress any fantasies, thoughts or actions related to it. Because of its influence on the church she attended as a teen, Shae had to fight for years to emancipate herself from the movement’s psychologically invasive, detrimental ‘teachings’. “People were taught to be ashamed of their body and ‘turn off’ any desire deriving from it,” she says. “Women were told to not wear shorts because it would provoke men, and I remember thinking, ‘why should we be responsible for how men lust after us? Why should it be our responsibility to deal with their feelings about our bodies?’”
Part of the motivation behind the volume also came from the fact that Shae’s mother and sister had struggled to embrace their own body image while she was growing up. From the very beginning, her goal was to “bring in and represent as many different types of women as possible”, allowing each one of her sitters to feel as comfortable in their skin as in the environment around them. Differing in age, background and size, the protagonists of the series are united by their trust in Shae’s empathetic lens. Set against the breathtaking backdrop of a number of deserted landscapes across the US, and portraying her muses as they blend in with the textural, chiaroscuro of the surrounding sceneries, the images inhabiting Another World are an empowering ode to women’s connection to Mother Earth, its raw elements and inescapable cyclicality.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ 1989 book Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, about how, with ageing, one gains wisdom and perspective, often getting closer to nature,” she says. For artists Remedios Varos and Dorothea Tanning, and photographers like Anne Brigman, Francesca Woodman and Sally Mann, “this connection to the body, the natural realm and the mystical, this coexistence of darkness and light, was not only always present, but it was also what came to define their unparalleled artistic sensibility and resilience”, Shae explains. At the heart of Another World lies her acknowledgment of the contrasting, at times traumatic experiences that constitute women’s lives, and her desire to visualise the overlooked sides of their stories.
Recruiting volunteer participants for her shoots via Instagram-based open calls, she sought ways of “making art with female bodies without it being exploitative”. Instead, Shae treasured Another World as an opportunity to engage with women from “different walks of life, hear about their upbringing, the way they were raised and felt about their body image”, all on the same day.
For years, the artist would pick up her sitters at an agreed meeting point and drive for hours in the car to scout the right location. As for the rest, there were no real plans or expectations. “A lot of these women were strangers to me, many of them had never been photographed nude before, and most of them are not professional models. I had been wanting to shoot nudes long before the start of this project but, up until then, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Portraying these women’s bare, timeless beauty in dialogue with such powerful landscapes meant embarking on a journey of healing. And while I am still learning, and always will, Another World is my love letter to women, the interconnectedness of nature and all the beautiful colours under the sun.”
Credits
Photography Shae Detar