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Alice

 

My body of work explores the aspect of mental health which I try to show through abstract art techniques. In year 1 my work explored addiction, and that theme led me to mental illnesses and how they affect people daily. Mental illnesses are disabilities that are invisible to the eye, they are disabilities that live in the mind, affecting the person’s vision and impression of life. I used repetitive patterns throughout my pieces. Mental illnesses have become more and more present in our everyday lives, as technology and medical sciences get more precise everyday, more and more people are diagnosed with various disorders that will change their lives. As an individual who suffers from various mental illnesses, this was a very important theme for me. 

My work is mostly 2D and uses an abstract style. I used mostly acrylic paint to create large flat areas of colors, geometric or organic shapes and they were overlain with concentric lines, mostly curved, sometimes geometric, but always with a contrasting color, black or white. This created almost an optical illusion feeling of imbalance in my pieces sharing instability of mental conditions. My concentric lines and patterns are either drawn with posca pen, sewn with thread or painted, normally serendipitous. My pieces are quite spontaneous and experimental. I discovered different ways to create shapes and patterns that I could use to make my art pieces more interesting, such as using a string dipped in paint before dragging it on a canvas to create an abstract shape. I was greatly inspired by the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandisky and Frank Stella, the concentric circular motifs and shapes of Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay. The use of a wide range of bright colors was a really important part of my exhibition and I used a repetitive color scheme all throughout my exhibition. 

I tried to create an environment that submerges you in my universe. This was done through the repetition of patterns, and by the different sizes and shapes of the pieces. The space given to me is a corner that I transformed into my own special universe. The paintings are exposed depending on the scale, the audience walks in from two entry points, each showing two large scale paintings. All throughout my exhibition there is a clear color palette. The artist Yayoi Kusama inspired me gravely to create this exhibition, the parallels in her work with mental illnesses, the repetition of patterns, colors and the whole room engulfing the audience. 

The intention of my exhibition is to show the audience how mental illnesses can impact your everyday lives. How even the most beautiful moments, like a sunset, can be ruined by anxiety or other illnesses, as shown in my painting sunset in a panic attack in which concentric lines engulf and superimpose over the landscape. I tried to show how tiring and filling it can be to have a disease impacting you every day. I used big spaces for a lot of my pieces that I filled with a lot of small details, and concentric linear patterns to show how much your brain fills up and “overheats” in a way because of anxiety and depression. A lot of teenagers have mental illnesses and are found to be hurting or anxious about small problems that over fill their lives and their minds. My exhibition aims to raise awareness of this exact problem that teenagers are faced with everyday and the repetition of my pieces show the repetitive way that an illness works on your mind, always the same details but in another setting. 

 

 

 

The Good Die Young (February  2023)

Acrylic paint and posca pen on wood

123x90 cm

For this piece I first painted the wood red and then went on with some deep blue on top of it. I used a paint roller to spread it everywhere and then I dipped a string and paint and created a small splash of paint in the middle of the canvas. This piece represents what drugs feel like, this piece is meant to be chaotic, and to create this effect I used the shapes and the imperfections in my paintings to create patterns and forms. 

 

 

A Sunset in a Panic Attack (October 2022

Acrylic paint and posca pen on canvas

150x102cm 

This piece was inspired by a picture I took in Sardinia,I constructed lines across the sky. I then started painting the whole sunset, I created the sketching in the sky using a thin black posca, added a thin white line on the top of each line to add more texture and depth. Claude Monet’s work in “Impression, Soleil Levant” inspired this piece. This artwork shows how a mental illness can ruin a beautiful moment, how anxiety can make you overthink things as simple as a sunset.

 

 

Seeing Into the Light (January 2023)

Acrylic paint and posca pen on foam

70x50cm 

For this piece I used a string, dipped it in paint then placed on the canvas. I then applied a pressure on the string using another canvas and I pulled the string. I used the shape it created to create a full accumulation of diverse shapes and patterns. In the paint I drew two humans, using the shape the paint had made, with a posca pen and added a pattern that I had used in a few pieces previously. This piece gave me the opportunity to experiment with different techniques with paint.

 

 

 

 

Antlers in Between Worlds (December 2021)

Ceramics 

21 x 10 x 22cm

Antlers in between worlds was inspired by a sculpture made by Clara Meneres in limestone rock, that represents the torso of a poet named Luiz Vaz de Camões, with the purpose to honour Portugal’s greatest poet. I used clay to make this sculpture, and kept an abstract aspect and to keep the psychedelic theme that I had set. I inspired myself with the shapes used in the sides of the sculpture and I related it to an antler. I then created my piece with the mindset of keeping an antler shape. 

 

 

 

Addiction to Numbness (April 2022)

Paint, Faux Fur 

68 x 40cm

Addiction to Numbness is inspired by Wassily Kandisky Composition VII, for the abstract background: and I inspired myself with Chuck Close's Big portrait, where he used acrylic on canvas to create a realistic black and white drawing. I also used my recurrent theme of addiction. I wanted to create a contrast between the photorealistic woman and the abstract background, and also make the texture of the smoke of the cigarette stand out more.

 

 

 

 

Bubbles of Pure Madness (December 2022)

Acrylic paint on canvas, thread and posca pen 

123x68 cm>  

This piece was my first independent project, I inspired myself from Robert Delaunay’s use of repetitive shapes in “Carousel of pigs”, and I used a similar colour palette to Sonia Delaunay “Le bal bullier”. This helped me create a repetition of different sized circles of different colours, where I then constructed a repetition of lines in each circle. This helped me create various textures in my piece and create a sense of madness.

Sewing Into the Light (February 2022)

Acrylic paint on canvas, needle & thread 

41x34 cm

This piece was one of the most challenging pieces yet as I had to sew the totality of the pattern. I first sewed one eighth by hand before deciding that using a sewing machine would be easier. The use of the machine sped up my process and in only a week I was done with the piece. I created this piece in the mindset of showing how little can seem when they are hidden, the black thread is barely noticeable at first, but the longer you look, the more depth the piece takes.

 

 

 

Installation Piece (March 2023)

posca pen on various objects

Mirror: 69x35cm

I decided to use objects that I found around my house  and I drew my pattern repetitively on different objects, a mirror and a lamp, to submerge the audience into my theme, and into this abstract world I am trying to create. The artist which inspired me is Yayoi Kusama who creates this parallel world filled with dots.

 

 

Here Comes The Sun (March 2023)

Acrylic paint and posca pen on wood

125x100 cm

This piece was made using a large wood canvas. I separated it with two thirds painted in yellow and one third painted in blue. For the yellow side I used a string that I dipped in blue paint and then placed on the canvas to create a splash, and then I did the same with red paint. I filled the rest with my pattern, keeping one side coloured and one side in black and white. For the blue side I used red yellow and blue to create two patterns that I separated and decorated.