Chloe Lee

unravel

Often, I feel as though I am perpetually still. The surrounding world–foggy mornings and the first crimson leaves of autumn, sticky summer heat and brilliant verdant leaves–exists in constant, fluid motion. Each moment is ephemeral, happening just once, then disappearing with all the subtlety of a failed supernova. But I am inanimate. Stuck, as though time moves in slow motion and somehow I need to sprint to catch up with traces of reality. I trip and stumble through the motions, yet the cavity in my chest renders me breathless. In the end, it’s always the same place I began that awaits me.

I’ve understood this inertia in two ways. First, as a tether to the past, a nomad of hazy memories. It’s the familiarity in looking through faded photographs and dusty bins of childhood keepsakes. But it’s also desperation, the gnawing desire to preserve and protect what is nestled in the past. Vignettes of those who live only in letters and stories, walking the same path in hope of something appearing once more.

In the space where everywhere becomes nowhere, silence and stillness confront me. In response, I indulge a transience that both troubles and fascinates me. My work explores cyclical familiarity, the ways in which our known can become little but memory on a page: suffocating stagnation as time ruthlessly passes.

unravel is an interactive comic cataloging the relationship between a girl and the full moon. Though she looks to the moon and stars for their beauty and resolution, the moon, too, is bound to a cycle. It becomes fragile, fragmented – its shards dissolve reliability. Throughout the latter half of the comic, repeated tidal motifs create a sense of instability while the girl ruminates on what she believes to be true of the moon. As the final panel takes viewers back to the start, the unknown becomes intimate, then distant once again. It exists both inside and outside memory, a recursive cycle inviting time to linger as the outside world blurs together.

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unravel, lined available for download here. \\ unravel, pixel available for download here.

http://chloesoojin.com

@skyloftinq