Pleasure as Nourishment
Oil pastel on pastel paper and wood (series)
Jamaica Plain, MA 2025
Artist: Emily (Em) Tebbetts (they/them)
This series explores the concept of pleasure as nourishment in the midst of chaos, collective fear, and significant personal transition in the cold grey quiet of Boston winter, 2025. Drawn to the creamy texture, bold colors, and the yummy feel of painting with oil pastels, each element emerges from pleasure-centered movements, marks, shapes, and colors.
Em sees marking art purely for the pleasure of it is a practice of fierce nourishment and a reclamation of inherent worth, particularly as a human navigating life + the dominant culture of supremacy, extraction, suppression + oppression in a queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled body with CPTSD.
What Might Emerge?
Cyanotype on paper (series)
Jamaica Plain, MA 2023-24
Artist: Emily Tebbetts
Initial Thematic Concept Collaborator: Maggie Ruth Haaland
Initially, this series began as a parallel collaboration between Emily Tebbetts (they/them) and Maggie Ruth Haaland (she/they), as a meditation on the themes of grief and joy.
Em’s take on the initial prompt evolved into an embodied exploration of the experience of navigating the long process of healing from Complex PTSD. This series is Em’s exploration of the themes of faith, fear, surrender, grief, desire, open-heartedness, self-worth, and self-care, brought to life with the help of plants found on Em’s daily walks around the neighborhood with their dog, Frug.
Before experiencing a disabling CPTSD burnout in 2018, Em’s main medium, passion, and career was photography - a relationship that became badly ruptured post-burnout.
After taking a Cyanotype workshop taught by Crystal Bi at DS4SI in 2023, Em quickly fell in love with Cyanotype - which is, in fact, a form of photography. Cyanotypes became a near-daily writing practice for Em as they processed the grief, rage, yearning, and hope that came with CPTSD recovery.
Now, in 2025, Em has begun to repair their relationship with photography, finding deep delight, pleasure, and the beginnings of purpose in reuniting with their camera. Much of the grieving that allowed that repair to become available happened thanks to this Cyanotype project.
Slow Down, Let it Move You
Block prints and gouache on botanically dyed paper (dyed with black walnuts, marigolds, onion skins, avocados, or eucalyptus) (series)
Jamaica Plain, MA 2023-24
Artist: Emily Tebbetts
This series is an embodied exploration of the experience of navigating Complex PTSD and disabling chronic pain and illness. It explores the themes of faith, fear, slowing down, right relationship, trauma, grief, liberation, desire, and aliveness.
The process itself was a practice in slowing down: each element in the series is a result of a multi-part, emergent process, including embodied writing, intuitive imagery and font design, meditative block-carving, sourcing plants to dye watercolor paper with, dyeing and drying the paper, and printing each element by hand.
Wall Spells
Handcrafted wall hangings, converted screen prints on naturally dyed muslin, hand stitched to stiff foam backing (dyed with black walnut, onion skin, and marigolds) (series)
Jamaica Plain, MA 2024
Artist: Emily Tebbetts
An iteration of select pieces from the Slow Down, Let it Move You series. Block print designs were converted into enlarged digital negatives for screen printing. Designs were screen printed on muslin sourced from Gather Here in Cambridge, MA. The muslin was dyed with black walnuts, marigolds, and onion skins gifted by neighbors and foraged locally. The screen printed muslin was hand-stitched to two stiff felt pieces and attached to a wooden dowel with embroidery floss.