Digital Print & Screen Print

 

The power of language is explored through text using Digital Print and Screen Print. The language used represents the negative undertones associated with mental illness that are still heard today. The prints play with how we pigeon hole people through the language we use.

 

Drawing Project

 

 I studied the work of Arshile Gorky & Gary Coyle for my drawing project. Above is a study i did of one of Coyles charcoal drawings. He takes photos of the sea and from them, using a grid system creates his charcoal pieces. His work is amazing, he uses alot of erasure, continously erasing and redrawing into the work. I experiment alot with this method and from this went on to create animations on one pieces of paper by erasing and redrawing.

 

 

 

Wood Cut-Reduction Prints

 

The wood cut series explores how this stigma is ingrained in our society. The Irish psyche is still tainted by the damage caused from the affects of incarcerating people in asylums, and the use of inhumane treatments, where people had no voice. The affect of this happening in the recent past is seeping through the generations where the fear still exists. Fear and ignorance underlie the stigma and negative attitudes towards mental illness today. In the past, people were removed from society. Now the stigma is an effective method of exclusion in the 21^st century, causing the disempowerment of a vulnerable section of society. The imagery used aims to show how people suffering from mental illness are trapped by archaic ideas and the stigma surrounding it. 

 

 

Protest

I want to focus on protest and Mental Health. A protest against the stigma of mental illness.

Playing with imagery that gives the feeling of being trapped.

 

 

I began by protesting against the use of ECT as a treatment of mental illness.

The text plays with the effect of how mental illness was treated in the past, the use of ECT which still happens today. Text is taken from writings that were publised when ECT was introduced first in America; How it was believed that by causing brain damage one could be cured of mental illness.

 

 Experimenting on photoshop with imagery connected to electricity.