Collaborators: Ava Kopier
Teacher Name: Ms. Castelluci-Cabral
Grade: 12
Artist Statement: When I begin an art piece, I create meaning and a message behind the artwork as it inspires me to create a storyline specifically. As well as a piece of artwork that explains my morals and philosophy within my artwork, being able to represent who I am as a human means much more than just artmaking to me. It means I can express myself without words, which I have long wanted to do for a while now. My theme is toxic relationships, and these relationships vary romantically or parentally. My goal is to explore the darkness that surrounds toxic relationships and how badly they can affect someone and their environment. I also like to explore the healing process that can come with these relationships. My creations are very biased on personal viewpoints, encounters, and observations from these toxic relationships and I want people to know they’re not alone when it comes to struggling with emotional damage when it’s with someone you love. I want to convey feelings of reassurance and non-judgment. To create my artwork, I make decisions based on the tone of the message. If the artwork has a darker message or meaning I use no color or a darker color palette to give the visual view that it isn’t a ‘happy’ piece. During this process, I looked at a lot of artists who had similar concepts as much such as Emilia Cruz and Mary Cassatt, both who made artworks of women and their relationships with other things such as religion, children, and themselves. Several pieces of their artwork can be conveyed positively or negatively which is the route I am taking with my theme. It was easy to correlate these ideas of self-image and paternalism into toxic relationships because toxic relationships exist anywhere whether it be at home with family, friends, marriage, and dating. It could even represent the relationship with life itself which is what I like most about my theme. For this specific artwork, I decided to use plaster as my base as I knew it would create a sturdy base that would be able to withstand the weight and heat of other materials I knew I would be using to make my artwork. The plaster base would also give me enough “canvas” space to paint and decorate with vines made out of wire, aluminum foil, and clay. The vines were created out of these objects to make sure the vines would not snap and have a different shade range in contrast to the shades and tones used on the plaster base itself. I used different shades of green, the darker colors representing rotting and decay while the lighter shades of green meant the parts of the human soul that had not been infested with this ‘decay’. It was difficult to make clay my final decision since it left lots of residue behind but it was a decent clean-up process since the clay was air dry and a wet sponge removed all the white spots from our plastered body.
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