Sweat Prints
Just as body hair can elicit conflicting feelings of attraction and repulsion, sweat also creates push/pull responses depending on the social situation. Sweat can be highly sexualized, as seen in music videos with beads of sweat running down the bosom of an attractive woman; sweat can be easily offensive, like when we consider the wet pit stains of a construction worker in the heat of the day.
The “Sweat Print” series came about when thinking about the female body in an athletic physical setting. Created with cosmetics (or watercolor) and workout sweat on thin, fragile papers, they serve as a nod to Mary Kelly’s “Post Partum Document”. Though there is a bit of a poke at abstract expressionist works, the prints still relish in the beauty of simple mark making, implementing the artist’s own body as an artistic instrument and sweat as the medium.
Caitlin Albritton is an interdisciplinary artist, arts writer, and educator who lives and works in Tampa, Florida. She graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a major in painting, and received her MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited her works in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Her painting was featured on the cover of New American Painting South Edition in 2017, and she has been awarded an Arts Council of Hillsborough County Individual Artist Grant, and a Meyerhoff You+ Graduate Fellowship. Albritton has been an artist-in-residence at the Morris Graves Foundation, the Golden Foundation, the Bäsel House, and the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge.