Through my exhibition, I am hoping to show three themes: how our identities are shaped, their strong connection with emotions, and that we are changing every second. These will impact the audience to know that we are always influenced by something, and it generates emotions. Furthermore, my artworks depict both sides of feelings, positive and negative, to express that they live together in our minds, although they are opposites. All things around us and inside of us change every second, therefore our identities also change at the same time. My vision for this exhibition is that I want to present my works well-balanced in terms of colours. As my works have a wide range of hues and tones, presenting them by keeping the overall colourfulness to make all artworks outstanding will create a sense of unity that will help to express that there are a lot of things that shape our identities. 

 

Since I wanted to show diversity, my artworks were created by using lots of colours with several mediums such as digital, acrylic and Copic. When I compared the same colour in digital paintings to acrylic, I realised that they looked differently because of the texture and reflection of light, and this made me explore the possibility of expressing colours with different materials. Most of my artworks were created digitally because I like the vividness and clearness in digital paintings, but I always experimented with different materials for final pieces. For example, in the experiment for my digital painting Is Being Objective Painful? I made fake blood to see how the blood and red pigment in liquid looked like. 

 

For motifs, I mainly chose humans and subjects that have bright colours to make the connection between my themes and artworks. In most cases, my initial ideas came from personal emotions, therefore depicting humans was my priority. In the roots of all my artworks, there is the same theme of “sentience”, which means that we are able to feel something. This theme came from my personal experience in which I felt a sense of being alive and vividness of life when I realized changes in things such as time, emotions, and thoughts. In my first painting of IB Visual Art, I did not know why it had lots of colours, but after I noticed that the sentience was the base of colourfulness in my artworks, it influenced my artmaking by making me explore the infinite possibilities of colours and its connection with the vividness that the sentience had.  

 

Curating my works for this exhibition helped me understand the differences and similarities between each piece in my body of work. To encourage engagement between my work and the public, I displayed them by categorising whether they had a positive or negative impression on people. This categorisation encourages the audience to realise subtle conceptual changes in the works, such as representations of emotions, to ideas, to more mundane themes such as daily life, and to also be attentive towards the connections between colours, tones and atmospheres. 

 

Colours are a key element in my work. Dark tones were used to express the bleak, or negative side, of minds and feelings, whilst brighter colours were generally used to represent the contrary. Having these concepts in mind played a central element in how I curated my work. This was part of the decision of having my digital works framed. Seeing the prints through the glass of the frame is similar to how you see a digital work on a computer screen, so the audience may relate to my process of creating my pieces. 

 

In my exhibition, I am hoping that the audience feels, thinks and considers the factors and things that make identities, what changes our emotions and feelings, and that we are changing every second. We are influenced by many different things, and these are, for their part, filled with colours. Their colour changes our views, perspectives and makes our lives brighter, more vivid and more colourful.