The questions that guided my work changed to "What frustrations do I have?" and "How do I use a disturbing image to send a message about the issue?" All of the following pieces focus on a wide variety of topics that upset me, such as pollution, body image, the over-sexualization of women, and containment of emotion. I use symbolism in both materials and imagery to represent the ideas, while the colors and textures and image as a whole prompt the viewer to feel unsettled and emotional. Images 8, 9, and 10 display my piece about what happens when one contains their emotions. The platform represents the mental space and the jars contain materials that represent the emotions. The fire disturbs the mental state, releasing all of the emotions and leaving the mind a pile of ash. |
I live near Lake Michigan, one of the most beautiful lakes on the planet. It breaks my heart when I go to the beach after a storm and see all of the trash that has washed up. It saddens me further when I realize that Lake Michigan is one of the cleaner lakes; many other bodies of water in the world are much more polluted. My goal with this work is to capture that sadness as well as an impending sense of doom. I used very unnatural colors--the lake should not be black and the sky should not be that shade of red--to push my overall theme of disturbing imagery. The idea of an apocalypse is also quite disturbing especially one that humans have created, one that is likely avoidable. |