My first piece is based on my fear of conforming to become someone beyond myself and my truth. I was motivated to create a piece that expressed my vulnerability— allowing others to feel seen and providing an opportunity for viewers to emotionally relate to the work. This piece challenged me to express the internal feeling of this particular fear in a new and visual way while avoiding the piece being too literal, or not relatable. I showed the change between the two self-portraits by altering the colour pallet. The left portrait utilizes an array of bright and bold colours. As the face shifts to the left and becomes the second portrait the colours become darker and muted. By using colour psychology the physical colour change leaves the meaning behind the work to be perceived by the viewer.

My second piece is based on my fear of others’ perception of me. Something that I have come to terms with is that you have no power over how other people perceive you. Our personal image in which we hold in others’ minds is something that we constantly try to control— by the way we post on social media, the way we dress, the way we act— but no matter how much you try you can never others thoughts. A different version of yourself exists in the memory of everyone you have ever met, a different perception of you exists a million times over in the minds of strangers. I want people to perceive me as fun, intelligent, and loving, but I have no control over that. That scares me.

This piece challenged me to put that concept into a visual perspective. To do this, I painted the same eye on two different pieces of plexiglass, which when hung up separated allows the viewers to walk around the installation and experience different aspects of the work. The first piece is painted with cool colours, such as greens, blues, and purples while the second piece has warm colours of yellow, red, and orange. Depending on the height of the viewer and their location, no two people would be able to see the colours of the overlapping painting the same. The eyeball itself has been left the transparent colour of the plexiglass allowing the viewer to see through the piece.

This piece challenged me to put the universal fear of losing someone into a visual representation. To do this, I represented the original image four separate times. As the pieces become farther apart from the original picture, they become more and more abstracted. The first being painted with acrylic paints, and the last just an abstracted collage. The idea behind this is that as they depicted people grow apart from each other, their perception of each other lessons and lessons until a very small portion lives in each other’s minds.

My fourth piece is based on my fear of being average. I am not satisfied with the idea of living in complete normality. The idea of the extent of my life working a nine to five job scares me. I want to do more with my life. I want to strive to make a difference and disrupt the average lifestyle advertised to me. To visually stimulate this feeling I chose to create this piece as a triptych of three prints. The middle being mounted on white cardstock and the organic silhouette being printed in green. This adds contrast to the surrounding prints of either side of the green print. I chose green to represent growth, and that when you go beyond what others want for you, that is when you grow into who you truly are.

My last piece is based on my fear of feeling incomplete with my life. In my own life, I am scared of not being able to feel satisfied with what I have accomplished. The feeling of not being satisfied is what inspired this piece. To convey this message, I drew a self portrait using charcoal and pencil. I wanted this piece to feel personal, and chose myself as the subject. When choosing to add colour to the piece, I only added coloured with watercolour on half. This left the feeling of incompleteness of the piece, just as I attended.