Death and Rebirth:Chloe Gilmore’s Capstone
Ada Lambert | March 4, 2025
Ada: I am doing spotlights on different majors and I am friends with a lot of art majors but realized that I really don’t know what their projects are about. Tell me about your project and what led you to the idea.
Gilmore’s senior studio
The Ouroboros symbol mentioned
Chloe: Okay, yeah, so basically I'm a painting and drawing concentration, and I love drawing people, but I'm kind of doing a more personal project [for my capstone]. So it's exploring the themes of rebirth and life and death, and what that means. I'm doing a lot of things like the Ouroboros symbol, that's kind of creepy, kind of pretty, kind of peaceful.
Ada: How did you come up with this idea? What led you to want to work with these different topics?
Chloe: Well, it might be too personal, but the Echo can take it, it's fine, it's my last year. I struggled with addiction last year, and this has been my year of working through that, and it made me realize how so many parts of myself are shedding and falling off and dying, and it's scary, but I'm also being reborn into a different person. So that's what inspired it, and I'm trying to abstract it so that more people can relate. Because I think everyone goes through something in their life, like the hurricane, that makes you rethink everything about yourself and the world around you. Even with the river, if you think about it, even after everything bad that happened, the river is still flowing, and it's completely different, and it's changed, but it's still the river, so I guess a lot of things inspired it.
Ada: Do you think the hurricane also gave you some inspiration for this project? Or was it mostly your own personal things that you were going through?
Chloe: I had the idea beforehand, but [the hurricane] definitely enhanced a lot of my ideas. Because, like I said originally, it was getting more personal, I was going to do more self portraits and me, me, me, me, me. But after the hurricane, I've kind of incorporated more nature into it. This is also kind of a side note, but I love spirals. Spirals are my favorite thing in art, and I realized that there are a lot of ways that animals die on accident in a circle or a spiral, like rat kings. This has been a phenomenon for a long time, where people will find a bunch of rats with all their tails stuck together in the middle, and it'll be a big circle of rats. Oh, it's weird. Then bulls sometimes they get into fights, and their antlers get stuck together, and they just spin in circles. And if you think about that in nature, they just spin in circles till they die if there's not a farmer to break it up, right? Or, like, snakes will eat themselves, yeah? Like, who does that, right? But how do you do that? I don't know. But like us as humans, it's kind of what we do, like to an extent, we all have habits that we don't know are eating ourselves.
Ada: Everything's very cyclical. I’m thinking of the Buddhist symbol of the Unalome. It’s a spiral, and then there's a line that extends upwards with three dots at the top. And it's representative of how life is not linear and healing is not linear. Like you might get to a point in your life where you think you have grown to be this ultimate version of yourself, but then you get knocked down and you have to grow again in a different way. I've went through that just in my time at Wilson, like I came in feeling healed and cured from everything, I was away from my family for the first time, but then you go through another hardship and you've fallen down, and you need to find new ways to uplift yourself again. It’s really interesting to see how things move like that.
Chloe: I think it's really interesting, too. I think the permanence of things is so weird. Because, if you think about it, you've been Ada your whole life, but how many different Ada’s have you been? Right? Like, an infinite amount of Ada’s. Every time you wake up you're a different Ada, and it's reassuring, but it's scary, at least when I think about myself.
Ada: How have you worked through your struggles with that mentality that every day is a new day? I think what I'm asking is it's so hard to change as a person and to fight through addiction, you have to make fundamental changes in your life. How did you go about that? How did you motivate yourself and push yourself? And was art a part of that?
Chloe: Yeah, definitely. I mean it's been a process, it's been about a year now working through it. But it started off with so much art, like the first artwork I made sober, I literally glued my pills to the canvas. I've been deep into just making art with it. But I think another thing that I've realized is really important, and this is also due to the hurricane, is community. If you're only focusing on yourself, you're not going to get better. You have to surround yourself with other people that you care about, but also want to be a good friend or a good person to. That's helped me a lot too, because it's not just ‘oh, I'm getting better for me,’ it's like, ‘no, I care about these people, and I want to show up for them the way they show up for me.’
Ada: Has your artwork provided a space for you to kind of understand and make sense of the things you've struggled with in life? How would you say that your artwork kind of embodies yourself in those ways?
Chloe: I feel like when I make art, I'm in this meditative state where everything is passing, but I'm listening and it goes into the art. But I realized that no matter what I do, even if I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna draw a picture of my friend,’ somehow, I always insert myself into it, and I don't really know how or why, but especially, like, I was working on a piece, I can show it to you, but it's the one where I'm eating myself like a snake and when I was making that, I was definitely going through a lot of things in my head, but just like the repetition of the cross-hatching and everything is a really good way to get it out.
Ada: How have you experimented with different media?
Chloe: I've been having so much fun. I've been playing, obviously, like I'm doing henna [on paper] right now, and I've been trying to make really thick paint so I can do more 3D art over it. But I've also been playing with collage, and right now I'm collecting vapes and cigarettes, one because I don't think they should be littered, and they also do go into the addiction thing. I'm just kind of playing with anything I can find.
Ada: How have you found those items? I guess cigarette butts make sense. But, do you just wait to come across a vape, or do you go out looking?
Chloe: I don't go out looking, but I posted it on my Instagram, saying, ‘If you have any vapes, give them to me.’ Ever since then, people have handed me backpacks worth. Or, like, I have a friend who, every time they go through cigarettes, they'll hand me their carton. So some of them are mine, but a lot of, especially disposable vapes, because of all the lithium batteries, yeah, you throw them away. It's bad. I used to throw them away. I could take them to a lithium battery place, there are big hubs where you can take them, but it's a lot of work, and you actually have to pay to do it. So I figured I'm just gonna make art out of them.
Ada: That's so good. So how many pieces have you accumulated so far? And what's the end goal?
Chloe: I'm trying to make about seven or eight. 10 would be awesome. But right now, I'm only finished two. I'm also in this really weird phase of experimenting, and I'm in Painting 4 too. So I'm just making a lot of pieces and I’m going to see what works, because subconsciously, if I'm thinking about something, that's what I'll make some kind of rendition of it. So the themes are all pretty similar. It's just, is the color palette right, or does it fit with this other one?
Ada: So as a senior working on my own capstone, I feel like I've definitely locked in this year in a way that I never have before, and really centered myself around what I'm doing. Do you feel like you've got a sense of real passion this year working towards this capstone and this idea?
Chloe: For sure. I love art, and I've been making art forever, but this year, especially because I'm sober, I can actually think and focus on things for real. I've been really focused, it's gotten to the point where people ask ‘What do you do for fun, other than art?’ and it’s like, ‘Nothing’ because I'm just having so much fun. The only hard part is it is scary to know that I'm graduating and school is basically a job, and I won’t be able to go to work and play with henna all day and stuff. So that's the only hard part. I'm having a blast, but I just don't want it to end.
Ada: College is so unique for that because you can really follow your passion and be supported in that, because you're literally paying for it, paying for the education, paying to be doing this stuff. But then, when you leave, it's different. Do you know how you want to set aside time and intentionally have time to make art? Have you thought about what that will look like in the future?
Chloe: I just want to surround myself with other artists, like make sure my roommates are creatives of some kind because I think that's just good for the soul and for anyone who wants to create things. I am thinking about working in a rehab and maybe doing some kind of art therapy.
Ada: That's awesome. I think that'd be so much fun.
Chloe: Yeah, I'm also thinking about selling in local shops and doing commissions and T-shirts and stickers and fun stuff like that. One thing I need to work on is growing my social media presence with my art but that's another thing, that's difficult. As long as I have creative roommates, that's one thing. I love musicians. Musicians make my art so much better, like when I'm listening to live music.
Ada: Ooh yeah, being around creatives really helps me feel passionate about my work too. It is scary the idea that soon we will leave and have to have our passions on the side for now, unless we can maintain them as a career. But honestly, I think sometimes it's okay to keep those things separate.
Chloe: I think so too. Yeah, a degree is a degree. It'll get you a higher-paying job. Like, my dad went to Wilson and he had a degree in art but he works on computers. He is an IT guy and he makes bank, not really, but yeah.
Ada: Do you think it's daunting that art is such a vast thing, and that people are often like, ‘Oh, you're not gonna get a job with that.’ Have you felt discouraged in the past, and how have you stood true to what you want to do with your life?
Chloe: My parents have always been so supportive of me — my grandma is an artist, and my grandpa was a poet, and that wasn't their career. It was kind of my grandma's career near the end of her career. She doesn't work anymore. But I also grew up watching my dad draw, and he's amazing, but he doesn't necessarily give himself the credit, and he doesn't think he could sell his art and things like that. I just see so much potential in him, and I see that 'Anybody can draw, no one would buy that’ idea, and I feel like a lot of people take art for granted. So I think just seeing my dad growing up and them being supportive, but honestly, I make art almost for my dad, because he doesn't get the credit he deserves. He taught me so many things. Without their support, I don't know what I'd be doing. I don't even know how they support me, to be honest. It's like, if I was a parent, I’d be like, ‘What are you doing? For real? What are you doing?’ But they've never questioned it. Since middle school it’s been like, yeah I'm not doing anything else.
Ada: That's so lovely. Does your dad do his art mostly just as his hobby, or does he incorporate it into his job? You said he works on computers.
Chloe: Yeah, he does really cool stuff. While he's at work, he will doodle on note pages, or like print preview pages. Sometimes he puts these beautiful pieces on napkins and random sheets of paper.
Ada: Does he have any social media? I can put that in the article. I would love to give a shout-out.
Chloe: That would be awesome because he's my inspiration. Something that's really sweet too is I've been drawing for a long time, and I've not seen any commonalities between our art, but Catherine, the painting instructor, saw some of my dad's art, and was like, ‘no wonder you like lines so much.’ So we both do — even though we draw different subjects — still draw in the same way, which makes me so happy. Like, ‘yay,’ oh, but I can't draw trees like him. He does trees. He's good.
Ada: So cool. I love that.
Chloe: Yeah, I'm his biggest fan. For real.
Ada: So cute. When you were younger, did you draw with him? Was that something you did for fun?
Chloe: I would always beg him. I'd be like, ‘Will you show me how to draw this? Will you show me how to draw that?’ And so he'd sit down and give me YouTube tutorials IRL.
Ada: That’s so sweet.
Chloe: It reminds me of what we were talking about before. I think it's okay to have a separation from career and art. I just want to keep the passion alive.
Ada: Yes that is the goal! Thank you for chatting with me.
Chloe: Of course, thank you.
End of interview
To see more of Gilmore’s artwork, visit their Instagram account @chlobug_draws and check out their dad’s art account @benjigilmore.