About the Exhibition:

The central theme of my exhibition art work is identity and self image through my own journey with mental illness. The majority of the artworks are visual representations of pieces of poetry I have written. The poems are thematically connected in expressing my experiences with anxiety and depression through the typical parts of life as a teenager in a developed society today. This kept all of the art works connected to the theme with the very emotion behind them which is obvious to most people who have viewed my work.

All of the pieces are silk screen prints on paper using only black and a shade of purple or blue. I decided to use this media because as I experimented with a variety of different art forms I found that this was the one that worked most effectively with my art style to convey the meaning of the exhibition as a whole. I wanted the colours to be bold and without shading, creating simplistic shapes and this works perfectly with screen prints even when printing light colours over dark ones. My absolute favourite aspect of screen printing and the reason it came to be the only media form I am displaying for my exhibition is the way the mistakes I made when first figuring the media out, look. I create my screens with drawing fluid and screen filler and since I am an impatient person who prefers to work very quickly, the drawing fluid never ends up creating perfectly smooth and straight lines. These messy, handmade looking lines and shapes make up an essential part of my art style and I use it in order to show emotion and meaning in the work as well as creating a consistent visual aesthetic. The second “mistake” which I learned to love and later to purposefully create is bleeding in the prints caused by overfilling the screens with ink. For every clean print I make of a design I also make an overfilled and messy version. These add a different perspective and meaning to the same print design through a distortion of the design. Att Dränka en Konstnär pt. 2 and Liquid Courage pt. 2 are two of the pieces in my exhibition where this effect is displayed

The eleven pieces in my exhibition are created using only six screen designs that are printed in different ways to achieve a different effect in conveying emotion and meaning. My intention is for the viewer to barely notice it at first glance but as they look at the pieces for a bit longer, notice the same print designs in the different works. The pieces made with the same screens share the same title but are distinguished with a pt .1 and pt .2. These designs are meant to show different perspectives on the same events or feelings. It is a well known fact that a person's self image is often inaccurate and in my pieces show an awareness of this in showing how there are at least two perspectives to everything. 

Throughout all of the pieces the same character is portrayed once or twice. When I first came up with that character it was meant to be a generic representation of a girl, representing my stories in each of my artworks. However as I kept drawing her and making prints with the same character it became a form of persona for myself. The actual visual features of the character don't resemble my own, the pieces are not self portraits but the person in the artworks represent a part of my identity that is not visual but emotional. The girl represents my identity, my anxiety, and my depression and as I display this part of myself visually through my prints they reveal a significant perspective on self image.