Iterations of Self

Produced during the 2020/2021 Hear/d Residency through the AUArts Student's Association.

Project Artist Statement: My artwork explores how our understanding of self can be expressed in the attachment to and relationship we have with particular landscapes. I rely on memory, emotion, and experience of place to build up an image that is as much internal as it is external. In this work, Iterations of Self, I express the fluctuations in my mental health over time, exploring its influences and its effects. Throughout the month of March, and the one-year anniversary of the COVID19 pandemic, while still very much in isolation, I recorded my mental well being, rating how I was feeling based on four categories: energy level, stress, optimism, and feelings of connection with others. I transformed this record into parametrically programmed variables that animate a digital drawing, recording the impact of these changes on the landscape. The drawing depicts the view of Cascade Mountain from my home in Banff, a view which is itself as changeable as my emotional state. It represents at once a diary-like record of myself and the ways mental health can change our perception of our surroundings. By acknowledging this variability, I am examining how mental health is a relationship between the individual and time, that it not something to be ‘fixed,’ rather part of all of us that needs to be recognized and maintained.