Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Trypophobia

Trypophobia polarizes its audience. Mimicking the phenomena of tightly clustered irregular holes, the sculpture triggers trypophobia for those who have it, inciting a strong visceral rejection of the image. For those who don’t suffer from the condition, the work presents a seductive materiality with its elegant forms, beautiful indigo hues, and nesting seeds. If you aren’t triggered, it is an exquisite thing to look at; if you are triggered, you literally hate looking at it. The work presents the all too familiar situation where two people can have opposite reactions to an idea, an act, or a stance. In a political environment that inspires nothing short of this polarity, Tryophobia asks: How do we make space for two opposing reactions?

Like much of Bothwell Fels’s work, this sculpture came to be as a response to the hollow space behind one of the walls of Catinca Tabacaru New York.