• MY FMP is a collection of pieces rather than just being one final piece

MASKED

For this editorial shoot, I wanted to communicate how my anxiety, particularly my social anxiety used to make me feel when it was really intense. I wanted to create a visualisation of how having social anxiety makes you feel like you are being held back. You want to be around people and be confident, be yourself, etc but it’s like your anxiety is literally enveloping you like a transparent plastic mask covering your whole face which you can’t take it off.

[ like a whole transparent mask covering your face which you can’t take off = being able to see your surroundings + knowing how you want your energy to be like but your anxiety stopping you and holding you back ].

OVERLOAD

In the shoot I want to catch movement that visualises pain, anger, frustration, demobilisation, exhaustion, suicidal thoughts, stress which have all been caused by the things that cause my anxiety. I want this shoot to show raw emotion and pain. I also want to point out that I feel like my work is also a representation of the emotions caused by the police Brutality and racism that have recently come to surface due to it being filmed. Racism has been going on for 100s of YEARS and people have had enough. At the moment I’m personally feeling quite exhausted after repeatedly seeing black people getting murdered by police + white supremacist on social media . I personally have seen the full murder of 3 individuals in the past week on social media, it’s not normal, its disgusting, no words can describe fully how horrid this is. This morning ( Friday 29th May 2020) my close friend who is a black male living in America messaged me in the middle of the night telling me how scared he is to live in his own country. He told me that as a precaution he wanted to let me know how grateful he is that I'm in this life, he wanted to tell me this just in case anything happens to him. No one should have to go through this AT ALL. The systems we have in place ARE NOT TO PROTECT BLACK PEOPLE. It personally amazes me after 400 years of slavery which ended just over 100 years ago and segregation which “ended” in 1954, ONLY 66 YEARS AGO, that people think that racism doesn't still happen and that people are equal.

So I've decided to let it inspire the last part of my FMP, as my FMP is about my anxiety and the things that have caused it so I see it as fitting to include the most recent events in my work as they have a heavy impact on my anxiety directly and in-directly. In the shoot I will be directing them but in a way that causes them to appear they are being genuine, I also want it to look as if they are actually feeling the emotions their movements are visualising. I’m also planning to incorporate led string lights which I would use to give more context in the photos. However, I’ll see if I actually use them when I do the shoot, I will be including the shoot below.

So there’s a mixture of long exposure and normal shots, I definitely feel like the long exposure shots gave more of a dramatic storytelling impact and gave much more context to the viewer. The main feelings and thoughts I wanted to capture in the shoot were feelings of frustration, anger, pain, demobilisation, numbness, feeling isolated, alone, being in a whirlwind of emotions and having suicidal thoughts. Overall I feel like I captured all of this in the shoot. I also wanted to mention that the addition of the LED strip lights definitely gave more context in the photos. Again, I don’t think I am going to be individually naming each photo or giving a brief description because I don’t want to limit the viewer's imagination when it comes to interpreting my work and the photos however, I will be calling this shoot OVERLOAD as it describes my and other people’s uncontrollable outcry and vocalisation of emotions, thoughts and demands during this time of our lives.

I now wanted to explain about what I meant earlier, when I mentioned that I feel like my work also represents the emotions and feelings felt due to the police brutality and racism that has recently come to surface due to it being filmed . So I’ve been reading this book called LOST CONNECTIONS where the author Johann Hari who has had depression and anxiety himself, explores how we deal with depression and anxiety as well as mental health / emotional health as a whole. He writes about how he went to multiple specialists and scientists around the world to uncover the real reason of depression and the unexpected solutions. In the book he writes about how we should be looking at what is going on the person's life to cause them depression and anxiety. But there’s one point in particular that grabbed my attention - a study found that depression and anxiety is much more likely to occur when the individual has experienced a severe negative event, and has long-term sources of stress and insecurity in your life.

And then I realised that in my work I was trying to communicate how it feels to have anxiety which is obviously still relevant, but I was missing out the emotions I felt towards the things / situations that caused my anxiety ( up until the last shoot which is above ). I also wasn’t fully observing the things around me / past events that cause me to have anxiety. After some reflection, I observed the long-term sources of stress in my life as well as the negative events that have occurred in my life. And the main thing that I've noticed is that the long-term sources of stress and negative events that I’ve experienced all have one thing in common. They have always been directly or indirectly caused by an abuse of power and my emotions are basically in reaction to the abuse of power against me.

This abuse of power is the thing that connects the emotions I feel due the events occurring in my life and emotions I feel from police brutality, white supremacy and racism currently being brought to attention internationally (which I have repeatedly personally experienced and has also influenced the abuse of power against me on numerous occasions).

I know I just wrote that I was missing out the emotions felt towards the things / situations that cause my anxiety but after some thinking, I noticed that I was in fact showing my emotions towards the things that cause my anxiety because my the way I feel due to anxiety is my emotions towards the things / situations that cause it in the first place. - Feeling trapped, isolated, feeling broken, exhausted, being dragged day and night but expected to tolerate it and move on, to accept it. But I’ve felt all of this physically, I’ve even had medication prescribed to me due to body pains which were a result of the exhaustion of my heart. Piecing together all of this is definitely a turning point in my FMP (a turning point regarding the viewer now understanding in more detail my previous work for the FMP and the direction for my final collection of work for my FMP unit).

I am now going to be presenting another collection of work I recently created, this collection of work will be the last for this FMP and represents a stage in my life where I refuse to allow people to abuse their power against me and fight for myself as well as holding people accountable for their actions.

I feel like the things occurring in my life and the world right now have enabled me to be expressive and honest with myself which I feel has been reflected in this FMP unit.

As a result of all this I will be calling this final section of my FMP: HELD ACCOUNTABLE - this final section is also heavily influenced by racism I’ve personally received and the racism being shown around the world. Also for this collection of works I’ve mainly focused on exploring the use of texture and abstract ideology to visualize events, emotions, scenes, etc.

HELD ACCOUNTABLE

LOOK AT OUR PAIN, LOOK AT THE BLOOD YOU’VE SPILT.

The title of this piece is a statement towards those who have abused their power, have allowed the abuse of power, are racist, have allowed racism / stayed silent about racism. This is a abstract piece where I used red acrylic paint and hot glue to create a scene of blood being split and dragged to show the pain of victims of those that have abused their power to harm them as well as the pain experienced by us black people and the exploitation, abuse, racism we experience which is ingrained in our everyday lives - the hot glue on top smothers the blood, this represents racists and people who stay silent about the racism we receive - individuals, corporations with massive influence, etc - they are the people who also spill our blood by being racist or staying silent about it.

OUR STREETS

This piece is in tributes to those who have fallen victim to racism and those who have fallen victim to people who abuse their power to harm people. And to show the brutal aftermath these people leave behind by using blood “frozen blood” puddles to represent each victim. This piece is titled OUR STREETS to highlight that this happens in establishments we’re a part of and we are all vital to enable change.

HISTORY

This piece is an A3 multi-media abstract painting showing emotions such as anger, frustration, pain, energy, numbness, etc. It’s titled HISTORY to point out how the events going on in the world right now regarding racism is basically history repeating itself - so it causes the questioned to be asked: Was racism truly reduced and laws set in place to enable this or was racism made more discrete and ingrained into our systems and were law actually set in place to create loop holes for racism?

Well do we even have to ask this question because if we look around, like really look around, I think the answer is obvious. For the piece I painted various selected sections from my OVERLOAD shoot which I combined together in the painting. I’m not going to explain in any more detail as I left my OVERLOAD shoot open to the viewer's perceptions to a certain extent. So I would like to do this for this painting as well. I used acrylic paint, hot glue and coloured pencil as my medium of choice.

IN PLAIN SIGHT

This collection of two sheets of work is a part two to the A3 painting named HISTORY. The piece is named IN PLAIN SIGHT to highlight how abuse of power and racism has always been in plain sight, society has just normalised it and turned a blind eye to it. It’s a part two to the A3 painting because I used Hot glue to draw scenes from my OVERLOAD shoot so it has the same concept as the A3 painting. I used hot glue as it’s slightly transparent but still visible, I feel like this was a good way to highlight the fact that some individuals pretend they don’t see certain situations occur [ turning a blind eye ]. Also the background to this collection is an image of broken glass that I took a while back, I used this to highlight that people are currently to take down the systems that allow people to turn a blind eye and enable people to be racist and abuse their power and that currently the systems have cracked but we have a long way to go.

ANCESTRAL CHAIN

This is the last piece for my FMP. This FMP has definitely been a journey and it has had it’s challenges however, I feel like these challenges are exactly what made my FMP and is what enabled me to create authentic work, which I was able to fully express myself in. For this last piece, I named it ANCESTRAL CHAIN. It’s an abstract painting of my ancestors, the victims of racism, an abuse of power and oppression all abstractly painted and connected to a textured timeline to show how long this oppression has been happening. It’s also in response to the global outrage currently happening due to oppression, abuse of power and racism now coming light now that it’s being filmed. I hope that our pain and anger that's been carried over generations is enough to break the ancestral chain of oppression and make an ever lasting change and mark on the world. For this piece I used acrylic paint and hot glue as medium of choice and I painted on a A3 sheet of paper.