Gabby Severson

Instagram: @saucygabby

Website: https://www.gabbyseverson.com

Bio: Gabby Severson is an Indigenous visual artist working across photography, beadwork, basketry, and sculpture. Rooted in her upbringing in Oregon, her work engages with themes of identity, memory, and culture drawing inspiration from her Siletz heritage. She earned her BFA from Parsons School of Design and is currently getting her MFA in Fine Arts from California College of The Arts.

Statement: I take photographs as a way to record evidence of my Siletz identity rooted in lived experience. These images become a vessel for memory, a trace of a moment that resists forgetting. These images are then translated into digital patterns, which I map out and execute bead by bead. Working with plastic fuse beads, the process of creating these sections one by one is meditative; it allows me to witness the image slowly come together while engaging in the repetitive, tactile act of weaving. Once complete, I often scramble or remix the pattern, reflecting the complex, layered, and sometimes fractured experience of being a mixed Native person. I blend traditional techniques with synthetic materials such as plastic beads and synthetic sinew. The fuse beads, petroleum-based and globally sourced, carry their own contradictions connecting my work to extraction. I play with these tensions: What does it mean to be Native and make art from synthetic matter? What does it mean to use a material that has caused trauma to the land? My beadwork allows me to live within moments of connection to my Indigeneity, embodying personal memory while. I am investigating the photos, objects, and places that shape my lineage, revealing how my identity is formed through kinship, silences, and traces from the past.