Undertow Collection
In addition to being an artist, I’m also a mental health counselor. Ever since the beginning of the year, I’ve had more new client requests than ever before. People seem to have realized that covid has changed life. They’ve stopped waiting for a switch to flip and everything to go back to “normal”. People have been having deeper emotions, new thoughts. They feel confused because, “nothing is wrong”. They can’t pinpoint exactly where these feelings are coming from.
We’re all having so many emotions, and feel like we have no one to share them with. During quarantine, our circles got smaller. We pulled back, and some of us felt better at first. We realized we needed to slow down and welcomed the change. Others felt lonely or insignificant from the start. As the days wore on, we became more antsy or sad.
We didn’t have a community to share our lives with. We saw people, but we couldn’t be near them or touch them. It was hard to show others our excitement about the good things, as well as our hurts over all we have lost. We didn’t know how to support each other in our successes and failures. So we pulled more inward. We kept our emotions under the surface.
The dictionary defines “Undertow” as, “a current of water below the surface and moving in a different direction from any surface current”, but I really love the sentence they use to describe it - “I was swept away by the undertow”.
We became our own currents. Parallel to even those closest to us. In this collection, I explore the emotions we hide just below the surface, maybe acting normal, but feeling very abnormal. Using faces and hands, some of the most expressive parts of our bodies, along with color, and the movement of the paint to create emotive works. Not all the emotions we hide are the hard ones. Sometimes we hide the happy ones too, because they feel out of place in the season we are living through. Either way, what we are feeling on the inside often doesn’t match the outside. This series explores the whole spectrum of emotions from the past year and a half, drawing you into them and helping you to connect to something outside of yourself. Which pieces feel like you? What’s below your surface?
All pieces in the Undertow Collection will be available on September 30th, 2021 in my shop. Collector’s List subscribers will receive the password to get early access to view & shop the collection at 10AM EDT, and it will open to the public at noon EDT.