[6] Friendship

Abstract

Artist Statement

Three of humanity’s largest ideals in life are peace, love, and hope. They are ideals that are ever-present in the lives of any individual- whether you lived in 1362, or 2012, and whether you live in a 3^rd world country where illness and poverty are the norm, or whether you live in a high-rise apartment in New York City, they are all ideals that are universally understood.

For me, personally, these ideals have helped guide me through my adolescent years, and helped me grow into the young adult I am today. My childhood was filled with turmoil by an accident that left my only brother permanently disabled. Nine years older than I, he was always my hero. My big brother was unstoppable when he set his mind to do something, and I admired him for it.

Falling over one hundred feet and landing on his feet, Joshua had survived an accident that would put most of us into a grave, but as always, my big brother was strong, and survived with the help of countless surgeries that left him rebuilt with titanium plates, screws, nuts, and bolts, and numerous patched-up organs, which still work.

At the time of the accident I was ten years old. It was not only hard for me to understand what level of trauma was happening to my brother and my family, but it was hard for me to imagine a life any different than I had been living up until that point. This was my first experience with pain, trauma, and extremely blunt, immediate change. Not only did my brother run the risk of never making a full recovery, my family did as well.

We are permanently scarred by the trauma we all endured for years, wondering if my brother was going to survive. Enduring the intense discussions that my parents had over money, medical and legal decisions, and what to do with me and my education, all while watching my brother struggle to take every single breath of air on his own, and wondering if he would be around to see tomorrow, all affected me in ways that I had never truly contemplated until I started thinking about the concept of my senior show.

Peace, hope, and love are all things I had began striving for at a very young age, and I know that many other people around the world begin their search for these ideals even earlier than I did. My family and I are far more fortunate than many humans across the globe, yet most everyone, no matter their background can understand certain hand gestures.

Across the world each of these three main ideals has a different name, but the gestures a hand can create are universal. No matter where in the world someone is, or what time period they existed, the same motions have represented and demonstrated the same emotion or reaction. Love, hope, fear, wanting, reassurance, power, and many other concepts can be universally demonstrated by the human hand, and most of the time we as humans fail to appreciate the power that a simple hand gesture can hold.

In this body of work I am attempting to convey the universal meanings of these poses, and the three main ideals of life- peace, hope, and love while visually displaying the concept that each of these ideals somehow seeps into even the most common-day actions. Like every human being, each of these sculptures have their flaws, while the ideals pouring onto them create unification. Cracks, breaks, and visual imperfections are welcomed within each sculpture to represent the imperfect human state of life, and show that through our differences and imperfections, we are all ultimately, the same.