I'm sure everyone is well aware how stressful and anxiety ridden this semester has been. For myself personally, I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I work at a nursing home in town, so when this all broke out I had to evaluate what was more important- exposing myself as a high risk individual, or taking a leave from my job and being broke, jobless, and unable to pay rent. The latter wasn't a viable option. There were so many points in this semester where I wanted to stop and give up, throw away all my classes and just lock myself in my house forever. Especially when my facility finally became exposed to COVID-19. It was hard to cope with all of this, I had only my partner to rely on. At some point me and my partner started to go for walks to clear our heads. There's something centering about acknowledging the smaller parts of the world around you. As I started to take photos, I was able to zoom in and recognize the smaller worlds that ...
The Coronavirus really came at a time when I was finally progressing towards something substantial in my work within photography and Ceramics. I was finally catching my footing and headed towards a great direction for myself, and then it was all ripped from under my feet. I live in a decently small apartment with Ammity and David, and there really is not a whole lot of space for us three to create a lot of what we were making before everything and turn our living room and bedrooms into a studio. Not only this, but I lost the ability to continue the work in photography that I had been making of my family. My entire family has ended up completely separated from each other with all 4 of us living in completely different cities and states. So, making work on them became completely out of the question quite quickly. I began to only use medium format color photography to document my time here with Ammity and David and develop film in our kitchen sink. I am incredibly grateful that we were able to supply the tools for ourselves to do this, but it still was not the same. However, I did end up drawing a bit for a project in ceramics and I feel like I may have finally reconnected with drawing for the first time since high school. I broke away from the idea of it being realistic and began to use inks, pens, and water and had a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteI had a very very hard time motivating myself especially when everything first came crashing down. I started to lay in bed all day and be sad and would not even eat throughout the day until I was becoming sick and feeling even worse than I began. It took a lot for me to force myself up and a lot of help to continue to stay up and get outside. I stopped making and thinking entirely and it was really scary for me. I thrive from constant movement and things to do, when there was nothing to really do, it shut me down entirely. I saw some peers had more space and a family who was willing to support them were having what seemed like a perfect time during this all, creating hundreds of new things and using all their time effectively. I felt guilty that I had all this time for the first time in my life, yet I could not even get up and out of bed. I hope this summer now that the pressure of being a good art student has been lifted, I will create more things once again. I know we are all going through a life changing time and we must be easy on ourselves, so I am working towards accepting a slowdown in my work.