GRETCHEN NUECHTER

Big Girl is an installation and performance piece that places an experience on display. Grappling with the anxieties and tropes that come along with growing up, fragments of childhood and adolescence come together to create the space of Gretchens’ bedroom. Each element represents an experience and story completely personal to the artist. Everything has been extracted from the artist's life, and was at one point or another in her own bedroom. These things have come together, past and present, to create a history of her own girlhood. The audience is meant to enter and move about the space freely, and as it says on the door under “Gretchen’s Bedroom Rules”, touch, read and explore. This action is indicative of experiencing  adolescence, and an attempt to share that experience with the viewer. When Gretchen became a teenager she had lost all sense of privacy. She began to feel like she had been put on display, and she had to learn to ignore the outside viewer. Here is where she will reconcile with these past feelings, in her own future, as a big girl, back in her bedroom. 

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