Our experiences shape our understanding of the world around us. From the traumatic to the everyday, we are constantly adjusting and fitting moments into our schema, the data organization systems within our brain. This is the idea from which my work arises. I focus specifically on how trauma and loss affect a person. These kinds of experiences happen suddenly, and our brain gets to work figuring out how to understand and cope with the events that transpire. However, they do not fit nicely into any existing system. It is jostling. The new experience makes us reassess how we interpret the past and present. Emotions spill out in an unexplained way, triggered by a physical object or memory, and other times there are no clues as to what connection your brain is making. The reconsolidation that happens to a person mentally after trauma and loss change how one acts, sees and remembers.
Plexiglas, my medium of choice, is key in communicating the process one undergoes as they heal and are forced to redefine oneself. At this time, one is fragile and recollecting all the moments that now need to be reordered with this new data in mind. Plexiglas mirrors the self in its resilient yet breakable qualities. It is transparent and rigid yet plastic and distorting at times. Like humans, Plexiglas is easily manipulated. We assume our beliefs, morals and memories are rigid and strong, but in reality, they are quite pliable and subject to change. This is why there are differing perspectives on the significance of historical events or why eyewitness accounts of the same event can be contradictory. In my work, I layer and manipulate transparent Plexiglas causing the viewer's field of vision to be distorted functioning similarly to the invisible layers that get placed on a person as they go through life. These moments form the altered lens through which we view our past and present. Though I am working from my own lived experiences, my work allows a viewer to read it uniquely through their own lens. It activates one’s schema and opens the conversation about our perceptions and what has shaped them.