Demelza Bruton - Final Major Project, 2020 Exhibition
Artist's Statement
The value of being creative and choosing to study Art and then turn that into some sort of career, is something I have felt required to justify many times; the insinuation being that a career involving the Arts has less value than other careers. In a society that still seems to judge the Arts as something purely recreational and that is yet to fully acknowledge its academic value and the many career paths it can carve out for its students, it has been hard to feel comfortable proclaiming that, this is who I am and is where my strengths lay. The results of studying and researching both sides of the discussion, have given me renewed confidence in just how valuable the inclusion of the Arts within Education is and, that it is a valid career choice. Alongside this, the research revealed that studying the Arts has many other benefits including, gaining a wide range of transferable skills and the ability to give students, who perhaps struggle in more traditionally deemed as academic subjects, the opportunity to succeed in school.
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The value of the Arts, does not only include the prospects of having a fulfilling career, but it’s practice can also be used to open up difficult conversations, wage war on immorality and injustice without using violence, and has the potential to strengthen and enrich both the spectator’s and the participant's well-being. This link between the Arts and well-being has been well documented and for me, is of great interest. So the aim of this Final Major Project, was to create something meaningful, and to open up a conversation, that could perhaps be a way to get people thinking about what some of
our feelings look like, and therefore help the viewer to address them and perhaps make a way to process them, the good the bad and the ugly. This was, hopefully at least in part, realised with the creation of The Jars. The pieces attempt to literally capture some of the vast and often terrifying emotions people can experience, and separate them in a way that they could perhaps then be studied from a safe distance. The idea was to then display the paintings as if an eccentric collector had gathered them. This had to be adjusted due to not being able to display the work in a physical exhibition.
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To begin the work, actual jars were filled with various objects and substances, to aid the visualisation of the feelings and to provide something real to work from, regarding the glass and its reflections and shading. Each feeling was then illustrated and embellished upon using imagination and supporting research, in watercolour paint, to create something that for me, exemplified Depression, Joy, Anxiety, Peace, Bitterness and Hope.
There are some pieces that I feel were more successful than others. Mostly it is due to the over all composition of the paintings, for example, how successfully the glass has been illustrated and the detail and colouring of its contents. The least successful seem to be the ones that felt the most important to get right, perhaps demonstrating the direct affect of the pressure we can put on ourselves and how this can impact on our work, particularly as Artists. One painting, Desire, was not completed in the end, due to the practical impacts of the unfortunate times we find ourselves in.