Conceptual Process – Anxiety III
Cycle of Anxiety Series
This piece is the third in my series of works which are concerned with a cycle of anxiety, at least as I experience it. You can see the first piece, which deals with one of the physical symptoms HERE and the second piece, which tries to show how the ‘cycle’ feels to me (trapped, calming, calmer) HERE.
Clouded
This piece is trying to get you inside my head. I don’t know how much time I feel like I’ve wasted being somewhere I should be enjoying but it’s clouded by an overhanging feeling of something being wrong, thinking about some unexplained threat to do with work, or health or anything else.
When the worry is gone, you see the light again and the sunny day, but until you manage to make that journey, you can’t see behind the fog.
Sunny Day
As happens fairly often, this idea popped into my head all at once, fully formed. I already knew the picture I was going to us. It was a picture taken when I was under 10 years old, sometime in the 90s when I was taken by my parents to Honolulu as my dad had a conference there. I remember being super relaxed almost the entire time that I was there.
I remember relaxation and warmth of the sun and the interest of the beaches. Therefore this picture represents to me the relaxation and the enjoyment of a warm sunny day and beautiful things in front of you.
Anxiety does not always allow this and and work needs to be done sometimes to ger through the fog.. the fog in this piece to me represents missed chance of enjoyment, the heaviness of rumination and the regret once it’s gone that you didn’t enjoy the moment whilst you were in it.
Simple Pour
Once I had the picture from my photo basket, an old film photo that I didn’t want to ruin, I scanned it and printed it out.
I decided that 24 hour epoxy would do for this since it only really needed to be a frame to the photo and the ‘fog’ so I poured a clear base layer in my square mould that I had made ‘Resilience’ in (read more about Resilience HERE) and left it to dry.
Since I wasn’t printing on photo paper I used PVA glue to apply several layers to the photo to try and make sure when the second layer of epoxy was poured, it didn’t bleed in and ruin the paper. I found this fun and did an extra layer just because it felt nice to do.
Mica Magic
At first I was going to make the ‘anxiety fog’ by agitating the epoxy to create a load of bubbles, however I realised that when I accidently ended up with a cloudy pour it was with deep pour rather than 24 hour and that if I used some mica powder I’d have a much more control on where to place the fog and how to make it cut a proper pall over the scene in the photo.
So once the second pour was done I just sprinkled in some grey mica powder and lightly moved it – I didn’t stir it up too much; sprinkled and moved it around a little as I didn’t want the whole second layer covered.
Once I’d poked and prodded the mica a little, I left it to dry and hoped it didn’t start to spread out!
First Time Lucky
The mica didn’t move, much, and so for a chance an epoxy art worked out exactly how I envisaged it first time.
Once dry I pulled it out and set it on it’s frame and I’m really pleased with the representation. I haven’t felt anxious much in the last few weeks so it was quite hard to sit down and get this blog done but I enjoyed writing this one. Nice quick and easy. Next time we’ll be looking at a project I’ve been working on for ages which is very mixed media as well as a new shop launch to try and get those bills paid!
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