Through this exhibition, I aim to express the themes of emptiness in individuals' lives. All these artworks depict life in some form, and I try to express the emptiness and depressing element of people's lives within them.

I came to the decision to make this my theme as I have always observed the issues of individuals' lives within my family and in public. I occasionally saw people in distress or looking exhausted due to the constant work society goes through. I also chose this as life and emptiness are parallel to one another due to emptiness being the absence of life and life being a preexisting form. Therefore, making my artworks express life yet with a discrete feeling of emptiness allowed my artworks to flourish and intertwine with one another.

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Among the eight artworks, six of which involve acrylic paint, two are carved from aerated stone. Two of the paintings demonstrate space in a distinct way which expresses the emptiness and void like nature of space and life. Many of the paintings are different in size as I wanted to express these themes on different canvases. I also carved stone figures to represent life and I expressed the void nature of these carvings. I stripped all of the happiness or joy out of the figures by making them have a solemn/emotionless facial expression or by simply removing the face all together. For some of the artworks, I utilized bright lively colors to depict a childlike world. I did this in the Lost in the Park and the Demon War artworks. Both depict intriguing colors such as the pink grass in the park artwork which demonstrates my child like mind during the time of this event and the colors in the war artwork represent the propaganda that involves manipulating people into believing that the army is something to be enjoyed when in reality, death and misery is all that is held within battle. The artists that inspired me for the stone artworks were the Moai statues found in Polynesia. Otherwise known as Easter Island, they were large statues (up to 60 feet) built by the Rapa Nui people to remember the ancestors of their people. I was inspired by these statues as they also demonstrate life but with expressionless faces. Therefore, I decided to create similar statues on a smaller scale. Pablo Picasso was my main inspiration for my paintings. The specific artwork that inspired my thought process for these artworks was the Guernica. This inspired me as it depicts a combination of all the themes present in my artworks. It depicts life yet in a distressed and depressing nature. It also is demonstrating the idea of war and how it effects the world which I used for my Demon War artwork. Overall, the themes in Guernica are displayed throughout all my paintings.

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The first artwork that I painted was titled Lost in the Park and it depicts the event in my life where I was lost in the park for several hours. In that moment I was feeling empty and stressed as my family wasn’t around and I was completely helpless. My artworks developed over the course of the IB and is demonstrated by my Deep Blue Space artwork which is on a much larger scale. This was one of my more recent artworks and continues to develop on the theme being the emptiness of life. My art style remained relatively similar, yet my technique improved significantly. This is shown in the bubbles and the background design as well as the attention to detail. The very last artwork I designed titled Parallel Issues completes the theme that I was trying to express. The piece shows two life forms on opposite ends of the artwork with empty expressions. Both sides of the artwork have beauty and darkness. To be precise, the left side shows a bright and sunny sky while ground is full of bones and rats. On the contrary, the right side shows a rainy and gray sky, yet the ground is full of lovely flowers. This shows that people feel empty over their issues regardless of the advantages they have.