Purpose Match

This summer I worked at a coffee shop and we had a customer that would come in everyday that I would work. Business was slow and there was often entire hours where there would be only a few customers so I got the chance to really get to know someone I had served dozens of times. She told me see is an artist and I was immediately excited, I was so used serving to old men with the stench of respectability and this woman came along, she’s an artist she’s young and her perspective is fresh and unique. We started talking about themes in her art and she said its all about me. I was a little stunned at first because I am so used to talking about art as a window into society. She elaborated and I realized that it wasn’t as self-centered as a thought. She told me pain was the most powerful emotion in her life ever since she was very young and she said that since her first memory of pain she knew that she needed to understand it because it was never going to leave or change. I realised while talking to her that often times when trying to work on and understand own sense of self we can learn something that strengthens our connections. I am hoping to create a mixed media art piece that both represents me and how I understand the world. Through this piece I will unpack a universal struggle but through deeply personal experience and testimony. I find that when I reach into my own pain I can discover a passion to understand how pain is universal to the systems of oppression in our lives. A project of this type will need half of the time spent writing in private and the other should be time to experiment with how I can manipulate different mediums to convey my message appropriately.