Find Your Voice

Artist Statement

Our assignment was based around having our own voice on a topic we feel strongly about. I felt inspired by this because there's many ways you could go with it. I bounced back and forth from many ideas and at first chose to do something about "Blue Lives Matter" silencing the "Black Lives Matter" movement, but I felt more inspired by the idea of college. I made my piece of a girl rolling her eyes and drinking from a juice box that had stuff about college written on it. I wanted to experiment with how it would look coming out of border so I did that, but kind of forgot to make an actual border. I used marker, watercolor, and acrylic to paint the girl and juice. I had thought I was done, but then when I went to talk to Ms. Medsker she gave me the idea to make it a mixed media piece by gluing pieces of paper onto it or using another type of material. We came up with the idea to cut out pieces of college letters I've gotten in the mail, because I've gotten lots of college advertisements and for some reason have kept them even though I'd probably never read them. I'm really glad I did because I had so many different letters and postcard to choose from when cutting out the different words. I went through the stack and cut out words that I felt incorporated the stressful parts of college like "net price calculator", "focus on admissions", and "financial aid application due". I also cut out a stressful looking calendar and some percentages after the words "finding a college where you're more than just a number". I thought that maybe it was too crowded with all the paper strips, but I think that adds to the point of it being overwhelming. Recently, I've been told a lot that I need to think about college and SAT's and admissions. I think it's made junior year pretty stressful and I feel like I've aged like 148 years in the last quarter. I wanted to make a piece that visually showed the stress, but also made a point about how college is seen as a necessity and the process of it.