Minimum Military Service

Minimum Military Service explores the psychology of color and represents experiences with mental illness through a large-scale fiber art installation, mixed media paperworks and panels using maps from various military locations.I investigate how maps and their associations translate through different mediums to examine past traumatic events. As someone who personally struggles with mental health issues, normalizing the struggles of such experiences is integral to my personal growth and well being. I have always and continue to visualize stressors in my life as overlapping maps that even when individually simplistic, culminate to a complex obstacle. My two dimensional works come together to show the varying degree of each obstacle, intertwining and creating complex webs of stressors. With this body of work, my explorations in two dimensional media have spilled over into fiber installation, due to the intensely interactive experience a large scale floor piece, like Have You Walked a Mile in Those Boots?, can produce. Trauma from stressful events sits on a scale of severity and type constructing uniquely specific instances for anyone who experiences it, which is why translating this through multiple media lets me demonstrate such a spectrum in the most tactile way possible. The extended labor and monotonous, meditative process used to fabricate such detailed fiber work and multi-medium wall mounted works, allows me to channel my experiences directly through the process of creating. Integrating these experiences through the texture, color and mark making allows me to ground my work through unified processes of layering while still maintaining the vast differences in traumatic experiences that are dealt with in the military.