Artist Statement
My capstone project reframes the way society views mental illness and the people who live with it. Too often, those with mental health disorders are treated as outsiders, defined by stigma rather than humanity. This stigma contributes to misunderstanding, shame, and even undiagnosed conditions. Through my work, I aim to challenge these narratives and present mentally ill individuals as everyday members of our communities whose struggles, though often invisible, are deeply human.
My project focuses on four mental illnesses that I personally experience: ADHD, depression, PTSD, and anxiety. Using photographs and drawings from my own life, I create collage-based visual narratives that illuminate the lived experience of each condition. The work is deeply autobiographical. The images of my body, my spaces, and my belongings ground each piece in authenticity. I researched clinical descriptions of symptoms and then translated the ones I resonate with most into visual form. In doing so, I hope to bridge medical language with emotional experience.
For ADHD, I explore poor organization, easy distractibility, and constant daydreaming. These works highlight how ordinary tasks can become tangled and overwhelming. My depression series centers on apathy, loneliness, and suicidal ideations. Using muted imagery and subdued symbolism I convey a loss of interest and a sense of separation from the world. My PTSD pieces examine memory and numbness through the contrast between forgetting and intrusive flashbacks, reflecting the fractured ways trauma reshapes experience. Finally, my anxiety series captures indecision and the looping “what if” mindset, later expanding into works about timelines and the way anxious thinking alters one’s perception of future and consequence.
As the project evolved, I created new pieces that mark an important shift in cohesion and clarity via color coded borders. For ADHD I used neon yellow, depression was a fluorescent yet deep purple, PTSD was given an intense red, and a brilliant shade of teal was used for anxiety. These borders function as visual throughlines, marking each illness with a tone that resonates emotionally for me. Organizing each series by symptom helped refine both my ideas and my imagery, allowing the work to emerge with greater intention and vulnerability.
I am proud of how this body of work has developed. My goal is for viewers to find the “silver linings” within each disorder. Not in the sense of romanticizing struggle, but in recognizing the full person behind each diagnosis. By inviting others to see mental illness through lived, personal, and compassionate imagery, I hope to soften misconceptions and open space for empathy, understanding, and dialogue.
