Painting
Shannan Curtis
Recovery
Project rationale: My work, sculptural and painting, focuses on ideas specifically associated with mental health and recovery. My artwork is a direct representation of my personal journey with the recovery process after trauma. In my work, I highlight the resilience of the mind as it reconstructs itself and what it perceives as reality after trauma, and the attempt to reconnect to the reality in which the body resides.
I focus on using every day, domestic materials in the fabrication of my sculptural works. My use of mundane, overlooked materials explores the symbolism of the forgotten experience or persona. These usually normal and mundane objects twisted and re-purposed into new and unfamiliar forms, presented as strange organic organisms, display the accumulation of a certain mentality creating a new perspective.
Repetition is a strong motif in my work through the duplication of a singular object or similar objects, I am able to demonstrate the overwhelming nature of life and normal experiences for someone that has experienced life altering trauma. The inability to process this object as a singularity and from that, the mutation of what is perceived as natural or normal.
The natural world is another main inspiration for the work that I create. Subverting the natural world to display the alteration of the mind in an attempt to rebuild itself. Like the natural world, the damaged mind is restricted to an everlasting fight for survival. Reaching out and attempting to regrow what was once stable and certain.
I consider myself a ‘process’ artist as the intricate meaning of my work is embedded in the physically and time demanding fabrication of my pieces. My abstract works offer a strong aesthetic nature and embodies an unfamiliar naturalistic quality as it redefines what is perceived as natural. I find stability in the insanity of the tedious repetitive production of a piece and I not only consider it my therapy, but a further means of deepening the conversation of art and mental health.