Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting

Grace Emerson

I Need A Break

I Need A Break is a large-scale painting installation, illustrating the connection between spending time with nature and caring for one’s mental health.

“This installation is composed of multiple paintings on unstretched canvas, ranging in size and spaced out on the wall with negative space in between them. I attached the pieces to the wall using nails, and then I looped yarn and strings through them to create a mix of geometric and organic shapes, resulting in a more dynamic work. These paintings are cut into forms that are abstract representations of the different complicated emotions we as humans feel on a day to day basis. My decision to make the pieces of this installation close to person sized (or slightly bigger/smaller) is to give the viewer an opportunity to see themselves and their emotions within the work. I am thinking a lot about viewer audience relationships and want this piece to be relatable above all else. No matter what emotion the viewer is experiencing, my goal is that they will find something that feels relatable within the work. I Need A Break includes a wide array of materials that are both natural and synthetic These materials include: real flowers (at various stages of life), leaves, sticks, fake flowers, yarn, etc. One of my aims with this work was for some of the materials to not be immediately recognizable as what they are. In doing so I created soft sculptures that are slightly unsettling in terms of texture and appearance. I want the viewer to spend more time with the piece, and allow these elements to come together and provoke thought. My conceptual aim with this is to draw attention to the uncomfortable and ugly parts of healing/ caring for one’s mental health, as well as the parts that are beautiful. My material exploration has given me the desire to continue to open up the conversation around masking, and how we present ourselves to the world. We live in a society that is work driven and vanity driven, and it is sometimes easy to forget to truly care for oneself when we are focusing on how we are going to be perceived. ”