The feeling of being squeezed--compressed into a small space allotted for you in your own life. Where is the space for your own expression and your own opinions when you are constantly being pressed upon by those of the people around you? With relationships come entire lives. How much do we allow ourselves to adopt when we allow a new person into our lives and how do we determine how to filter out the problems that we do not need to take upon ourselves for other people?
Using a canvas the size of the range of my body allows me to directly communicate my physical energy onto the canvas. Crush throbs in and out of the space, carrying the weight of my intentions into the piece. The strange limbo we experience between knowing and loving someone in a relationship leaves us in a strange, foreign place where we can occasionally feel disjointed from ourselves and even wrung for every ounce of energy that is all put towards pleasing this other person. How naive they are to think that this part of us comes easily.
I created “Waiting For You” after being drawn to the idea that nostalgia is a double-edged sword. We remember the best of people sometimes, but not always the times that they hurt us, or at least not as strongly.
Frustration.
With myself, with my relationship with my artistic practice.
This piece started as a stress-relieving attempt to unleash some of the pent-up anger I had toward my creative process and the frustration that I felt when I tried to understand the way that I work.
The feeling of everything being exposed and raw. How terrible to feel as if you offered everything only to get hurt.
This piece was done utilizing my new practice of plastic sheet layering in order to more visibly see the separate and numerous layers of emotion that lie dormant below the surface and in the movement of the piece. The piece depicts a figure whose heart has been ripped from their chest cavity and they themselves are left alone to hold the evidence.
