Interaction Series

This body of work was part of the 2019 BFA Thesis Exhibition shown at the Marxhausen Gallery of Art in Seward, Nebraska. It was also shown at the Tugboat Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska as part of the exhibition Let It Rest alongside works from Pha Nguyen in December 2019.

statement

The drawings of the hands began in the spring of 2018. They were to portray how I was dealing with issues of anxiety and lack of self-confidence. Since then, I have made several hand drawings and started to incorporate contrasting elements to better depict what I want the drawings to convey. 

Before I started the hand drawings, I was journaling. I put my thoughts and anxieties into words. Channeling what was going on in my mind into a book helped me come to terms with how I was feeling and how to cope with those feelings. Now, I am doing that through my art. My emotions are made into a drawing on paper instead of words on paper. I wasn’t reading how I was feeling anymore; I could see what I was feeling. My drawings became my journal. This evolution of journaling made communicating my feelings more immediate because with images the concept usually arrests right away. Language takes time, which can be suitable, but not necessarily for this body of work. 

In the drawings, the hands refer to me, as they are explicitly my hands. I think of them as a self-portrait that expresses how I’m feeling or how my anxiety restrains me. Historically, self-portraits typically use the face. I want the drawings to be more relatable and applicable to the viewer; therefore, I draw my hands instead of my face. Hands can exhibit many feelings, just as faces can, by the way they are positioned and how tense or relaxed they are. The drawings may seem uncomfortable or painful, which is the objective. The purpose of the string or line in the compositions is to expand the uncomfortableness and to further communicate the suppression of a mental illness. The line is simply constricting the hand in some way creating tension. This tension between the hand and the line develops a presence of an antagonist and a protagonist, and I want it to be up to the viewers to decide what is what, putting themselves into that situation to decide what is taking place. The size of the paper and the way the drawing is oriented also adds to the way the viewer interprets the pieces. Depending on how the drawings are shown, the antagonist and protagonist can be shown in a new light; therefore, evoking different emotions from the pieces. 

This work relates to previous work in connection to the concept. There has been a need to create when I am feeling emotionally distressed. I have learned that by making art about the obstacles I encounter, I am quite literally facing them. There have been times that after I finish a hand drawing, I break down because I am putting my struggles on paper and looking at them. Sometimes, it is too much to endure, yet it helps me confront my problems.