Cecelia Webber, 1984 | Flowers from human bodies

Artist and photographer Cecelia Webber was born in New Hampshire and received a BFA from University of Southern California in 2008.She was a shy, socially awkward child who enjoyed reading and spent hours searching for small fairy creatures in abandoned maple sugar huts and dilapidated stonewalls. Oddly enough, as she grew older the world grew stranger and stranger.

Questions revolved about in her head, knocking down reality’s framework with the force of bowling balls: Why are we made to feel so ashamed of the human body in Western culture and so much of the rest of the world? Isn’t the body a beautiful, wonderful thing, deserving nothing less than to be celebrated?

As her thoughts continued to evolve, Cecelia alighted upon a petal in her mind, a new-found platform from which she could quietly challenge the status quo: she created a digital image of a flower constructed entirely from photographs of the naked human body.

Thus commenced her journey as a professional artist, as she continued to grow her Petal series, develop her impressionist and modernist paintings, dance vivaciously in her own fan-made music videos and experimental films, and even eke out a quirky, existentialist webcomic, while of course still setting aside the majority of each day to chase orange salamanders and other fairy creatures.