Artist Statement

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Have you ever been inside someone's head? I can imagine it is quite confusing because they have so many different thoughts.

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As an artist, I have concentrated on the theme of 'Identity'. I am always pondering another person's true feelings and the reasons they would give to hide who they truly are. I did not know the cause of this fascination until looking back to my past and at a time where I hid my own emotion as well as hiding myself from the rest of the world.

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Initially, I began by using photography to capture the inside of a person and the struggles they are going through internally. Gradually, I began to feel the photographs were too static though they would ask the audience to think about why this person is in this situation or what caused this moment in time to happen; it was, frozen. All you could take from it was what was right in front of you. This thinking lead me to video work where I could explore motion and how this can affect an audience's way of perceiving the artwork. Video has given me more freedom to show the complexity of expressions rather than it being a static image where the audience would had to draw meaning out. By using moving image, it becomes clearer what the intentions of the piece are.

 

During my Curatorial Project, an artist I researched was Tracey Emin. At first, I had the same thoughts as most people when they see her work titled, 'My Bed', which was "How can someone put a bed in a gallery and call it art?" Well on a deeper level, you find that it is not the bed that is the work but the fact she spent three days in it contemplating whether it was worth leaving it. Emin's work has made me want to look deeper into the meaning of things and how the outside of something is extremely different then what is going on underneath, all we need to do is look closer.

 

In this work, I want people to look at another person, not only looking at the outside but to think about what they may be concealing within. All humans hide things for one reason or another. By showing myself through my artwork it has made me vulnerable as well as strong because I have been able to understand myself in some ways. Mental health issues are generally invisible and I want people to see how people struggle with this.

  

Here I have opened myself up and shown you true emotion. By doing this I hope to let you reflect on yourself and speak out, if you wish, or simply understand another person a little more.

 

'Art is not about the visible, it's about the invisible world. It's about the things you can't see being brought into the domain of seeing' (Viola, 2003)

 

 

Shannon O'Loughlin, May 2016