Intentions and Theme for Personal Investigation

In my art 3 Personal Investigation, I plan to follow a theme of 'mental health issues on LGBT+ people.' This topic is very personal to me as I am going to use it to find out why and the reasons behind statistics such as 'a member of the LGBT+ community is in grades 7-12 found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth were more than twice as likely than their heterosexual peers to have attempted suicide and were more likely to have completed suicide. Six times as likely to experience high levels of depression and eight times as likely to attempt suicide in there young adult years.' Being a part of the LGBT+ community myself and also have experienced problems with mental health in the past I want to explore this and create pieces of artwork to represent the feelings and thoughts I was having during this period of time in my life and describe it through the medium of art. The artists I am currently planning to study are;

• Heather Benning (Installation artist) 

• Alberto Burri (Texture Artist, very abstract)

• Raymond Hains (Texture Artist, very abstract)

• Tadeusz Machowski (Use of Colour, very abstract)

I want to carry on using my methods of creating texture and stretching and challenging them to make some very unique and unusual textures as this is the medium I feel is best to explore this not only because I know I will be able to challenge myself but I feel as a whole the medium of texture is the best possible route to explore my theme using materials such as sandy paint, flowers, cling film anything can be made to feel like something else the big challenge for me will be to make the texture feel like what I want it to feel like and make sure that I maintain it to be as abstract as possible. Looking back over my work I have decided that to challenge myself further I need to practice and produce lots of high quality observational drawings as it is what was lacking I feel in my first year coursework. Over the rest of the summer I plan to visit numerous galleries such as the Tate Modern to experience my artists work first hand and really gain an insight into the use of texture in their work and taking inspiration for applying texture and colour to my own work. The main areas for primary research in my coursework this time round I feel will be in photography, observational drawings and gallery visits and my secondary research such as my artist research will be coming from mainly the internet and possibly books as well. To present my work as a whole I plan to do an installation of a bookcase that will have been damaged and destroyed on the inside to represent that even though people look fine on the outside you never know what they are really experiencing and on this bookcase I plan to fill with my sketchbooks and any other work I do as well as other books that I shall buy and fill the bookcase up with and make it really cluttered and confusing again to represent what it feels like when suffering with depression.


Sources - http://www.healthline.com/health/depression/gay