Posted by An NPHS Senior committed to raising awareness about mental health, portraying her unmasked experiences and struggles, hoping to create art that resonates.
“I really wanted to share my experience with mental health in a way others can empathize with. I created these pieces to evoke emotion, and for other teenagers going through depression or anxiety or OCD to be able to relate to my art and say “hey, I’ve really been there”.
Alienated
“Alienated” is different from the rest, it was from an assignment where you had to reinvent old artwork, which led me to explore further how I reinvented my identity and my style during my long recovery.
Torment
“Torment” represents a progression of emotions I felt dealing with depression.
Self Harm
“Self Harm” is pretty self-explanatory, it’s about telling my family I was self-harming– actually, making the self harm piece helped me be able to talk about it freely like I am now.
No I Am Not Okay
“No I Am Not Okay” is about telling my loved ones I was struggling while still feeling the need to isolate.
“I am inspired by art in every sense of the word- artists themselves, their work, their processes, the history and meaning behind it all.
“I find it fascinating how other artists share the way they perceive the world. Motivation-wise, I’m driven by this need to express myself and everything that’s going on in my mind, including all my random chaotic creative ideas. I love messy drawing materials. And I really like to experiment with pretty much every type of art under the sun. I love photography, painting, ceramics, and even glass. In college I definitely want to explore less traditional styles of art like metal work or even woodwork.”
For most of the pieces, I drew inspiration from my struggles with mental health. Some of them are based on my memories of telling others what I was dealing with. My art is almost always charged by mental health as a concept in society; I think even though it’s a really big issue in our world, there’s a lot of stigma around it and most people find it hard to share their experiences with each other in a real and personal sense.
My favorite work is probably “no I am not ok” because I feel like I captured my struggles with depression, isolation, and self harm as realistically as I could. It’s a really raw, bold piece and I didn’t care about making people uncomfortable with the emotions represented.
In most of my art pieces, I find myself expressing emotions associated with anxiety and depression through scribbling or lots of overlapping words. You can see this in the “No I Am Not Okay” piece and the “Self-Harm” piece
“I definitely hope to continue art in the future. Art is so intertwined with my life because it’s one of my biggest coping skills and methods of expressing myself. Honestly I’m not sure where I’d be without it. So I’m really hopeful wherever I end up, art will be involved.”
The Maroon 