tricia

My body of work explores the various stages of the pandemic that I experienced. I wanted to do this because I felt that by using visuals, I was able to showcase my changes and growths from this pandemic through a variety of imaginations and perspectives that occurred within my mind. I began creating pieces during the midst of the pandemic, which showed intentions of how I felt confined and isolated from the people and society. Then as the past 2 years progressed, I created pieces for when the pandemic started to ease and I

had to adapt my life to a new normal again. However, after the creation of pieces I made “during” and “after”, I felt that I wanted to showcase my explorations and emotions that came before the pandemic, which was feeling confined due to my daily mundane routines and feeling isolated brought by societal norms. Nonetheless, through the journey of exploring this idea with my artwork, I understood that I not only struggled with a handful of emotional and physical strains due to constantly living in an unknown circumstance, but I also did without a worldwide pandemic. However, I came out of this practicing personal growth and finding interests out of unpreferred situations.

“Spiralling into Isolation” was my first piece in this series, and I included colourful cut-out pieces, as inspiration from French artist, Henri Matisse. I decided to incorporate them because I felt very overwhelmed from seeing the same views in isolation, thus, showing how my imagination has broadened and extended through those colourful pieces that create excitement. The object is a figurine that was gifted to me by my mother, and because it is monochromatic and lacked any colour, I found myself dozing off when looking at it for a long time. Then, “An Escape of Comfort” was created using air-dry clay because the idea of comfort for me instantly means that I want a sense of certainty, something three dimensional to feel grounded and tactile. In addition, I chose to give my bowls and chopsticks a more personal touch, so the colours resemble those that I use at home, which again linking back to the title of this piece, permits me to feel at peace being in my comfort zone at home and indulging in one of my favourite foods. Furthermore, my piece “Breaking out? Or Staying In?” continues to utilise highly saturated colours as do almost all my other pieces. This piece fits into the category of what isolation felt like before the pandemic, and to speak broadly, it is about societal norms that are instilled into our society that more or less forces our generation nowadays to be part of, and if you aren’t part of that group, you are seen as someone who is out of the ordinary. Hence, I created this piece to speak about my perspective on this matter, so the reason why I used circles, squares, and triangles and filled them in with primary colours, is because I believe they both exemplify “basic-ness” since those sets of shapes and colours are what I believe people think of first when they are told to think of shapes or colours. Therefore, they overlap each other with those around me that are only acting like one another in hopes of not getting judged.

For the exhibition, I intend to display my artworks by replicating a mood board, and typically it is used as inspiration for an idea or topic, but in my case, I enjoy the way how ideas or images are dispersed on a wall. And through this display, I want the audience to view the full progression of stages that I have experienced during this pandemic. I intend my art pieces to be looked at from left to right as they are stuck on a tall white wall, beginning with the first stage which is my life before the pandemic, and continuously shifts along each stage to the end, in a linear manner but with some pieces higher, and some lower.

Ultimately, resembling my mind to a timeline of events over the past 2 years.