This two year course has taken me on a visual arts adventure. The course has consisted of broad assignments based off of subject matter or media. At the end of the two years I created a portfolio of 11 artworks portraying different aspects of my life. 

My brain is a big mess filled with a million different things happening at once. I tend to get distracted while attempting to focus on a task, causing me to become anxious. What really happens in my mind? How does my brain go from what am I going to eat for dinner to what is going to happen to my life if I don’t go to college (and I dropout of high school)? How does one express the mess in their brain when they don’t understand what is happening themself? A Day in the Life of Phebe, where does my brain always end up, and how does it get there? How does working on an English paper turn into research on the world’s largest statues? While my brain doesn’t seem to work in a “normal” way, I believe that I am not “weird”, I’m just unique. Anxiety cannot be solved by “breathing”. Telling a person with Attention Deficit Disorder to just pay attention is probably a waste of time, because no matter how hard they try, it is nearly impossible. My “problems” are not easy, yet they are not impossible to overcome.

I want to express my unique brain and my unique way of thinking through art. Tangents and non-sequiturs are the results of my unique way of thinking. Creating artwork is when I truly feel focused and present. Although portraiture, specifically self portraiture, has always been difficult for me, I believed it was the best way to express my thoughts cohesively and realistically. My bright red hair is a defining feature of mine. While referring to me people say, “You know the redhead girl with the glasses.” The combination of digital art and traditional media expresses my range of abilities and experiences. Most people have a right and left brain, mine expands beyond that. Art has inspired me in many ways, to try my hardest and to work towards and ultimate goal. My exhibition is a combination of many of the skills I have acquired in my ten years of creating art. My work is cohesive in the subject matter and in the way that I chose to represent myself. In the traditional media pieces parts of my face were blocked or cut off, representing the incomplete nature of my life and thoughts. In the digital pieces, my use of color emphasises my unique bright red hair and my setting. I want to express the variety of things that I enjoy and am able to do. My hope is that the viewer can truly appreciate my mind and have a new understanding for mental issues involving attention and anxiety. Mental health is not something made up and I hope that people understand that advocacy for helping people with mental health can assist people like me become capable of anything.

My exhibition was displayed in the format of a mind map. At the bottom of the exhibition, My Open Brain is meant to be the starting point for the viewer. As the viewer’s eye continues throughout the exhibition, it is lead by a yarn trail to lead to the different aspects of my life and how they interact with each other. I chose to display my work in this unconventional way to visually express how many things are jumbled into my brain at once. The physical opening of my head is representative of me opening myself up to the viewer, becoming vulnerable by exposing myself and my entire life. The viewer does not need to stay in one place to view my work, they can jump around and get very close to my work and examine each piece closely, and also step back and view it as a whole.