REM
REM is a body of work consisting of several elements—encaustic, photography, digital art, and poetry. While existing as individual works, they come together as a cohesive body, expressing my relationship with mental health and the effects it’s had on my understanding of the world around me.
I use encaustic—often over a single photo or collage, but sometimes on it’s own—to represent what I imagine are the physical textures and colors of various emotions such as anxiety, mental numbness, or drifting. Using a glass surface, as substrate, these images are a combination of nature and other photographic elements that speak to both the fragility and resilience of the human mind—two words that I find are at the core of this project. As an autobiographical driven series, the photographs are at times self portraits, yet absent of a representation of what I look like as a way to convey specific feelings of detachment and depersonalization. This way of presenting self leaves my particular narrative open to interpretation.
The digital art pieces come into play as I experience the changes of daily life that have come with the unprecedented arrival of COVID-19. As this world-spread virus has upended so many lives and creative approaches to making work, I knew I had to reinvent the way I would tell my story moving forward, while still remaining true to the original narrative. Unable to share the physicality of encaustics, I started to consider this process in a digital realm, asking myself: how would they, as literal objects, translate and transform into a virtual landscape? Still utilizing my archive of photos—such as close-ups of different textures, cropped body parts, or other objects that I believe can hold relevance—as well as introducing my love for drawing, I found new and exciting ways to blend and collage them into digital illustrations.
As a visual artist that also writes poetry, words play a role in this project as a bridge between the abstract and ambiguous nature of the visuals, and their specific narrative. But just like the other elements of REM, this too has had to evolve, and find different ways into the work under current circumstances.
Together, the elements of this project have greatly aided in self-healing and have gifted me with a better understanding of who I am as an artist, and the limitless ways in which I can share pieces of myself with others.
