Grabbing Opportunities - Exhibition

The Corn Exchange Exhibition has nothing to do with the University of Salford, it's a completely independent exhibition run and created by my peers and I.

I'm able to submit up to 6 images to be displayed of any size. I've thought long and hard about what I want to show and narrowed it down to these 4 images.

I'm thinking of titling this small selection of work 'Mind Matters'. The reasoning for his body of work is based around the problems the human mind might have to tackle at some point in our lives.

I don't like to base my work around the cliché topics although admittedly with this body of work It could seem I have done, purely due to the immense impact that these matters had upon my life at that time, there was no escaping them. 

We all at one point in our lives go through tough times and have to find ways to deal with them whether we tackle them in silence or with a bit of help, I for one don't like to share my feelings verbally, I find it much easier to express them through imagery as it's more comfortable in the way that I can hide behind the work.
When I was leaving college and my little brother was starting high school I noticed a lot of changes within the way the youth of that generation were acting, they seemed a lot more 'grown up' than what I did when I was their age so I started looking into the reasons why. Media is obviously a massive influence on the children of today because it's everywhere we look, models, celebrities, fashion and make-up are thrown into the vulnerable faces of these kids everyday leading towards them developing pre-mature traits such as excessive make-up wear, exposing fashion, bad language and more serious matters such as depression, anxiety and anorexia. I realized at the time I was showing signs of these problems within society, I was becoming the subject of my own work due to personal reasons so I stopped looking at how media and comparisons with other people were effecting the youth of today and looked at how it was effecting myself. The first and last images shown above express some of these problems.
The other two images are more about the 'keeping things locked away inside your mind' part of the project. When we feel stressed or down, we try to find things to help them feelings out and make us feel better, for a lot of us we cling to some form of 'escape' whether it be music, writing, sitting in your shed...Most of us have that 'special place' that only we go to. The third image expresses my 'special place', whenever I feel down, stressed or like I need to get away for a few minutes I think about the times that my granddad used to take me, my brother and my cousin to what seemed to be a 'magical place', when we were younger. It was a forest full of blue bells and other exotic flowers, there were mushrooms growing, butterflies everywhere an long grass you could hide away in. I don't know where this place is yet it's my favourite place in the world.
The second image is less of a personal expression yet still something close to my experiences so far. It's based around child abuse and not being able to speak up to get help, it's a very serious matter so I wanted to express it in less of a shocking, disturbing way and more of a comfortable yet still gripping manner. The beads play on the childlike aspect of it and the spelling of 'Shh' help in place by my mouth is often misread as 'Hi', I purposely did this to symbolize the secretive aspect based around this whole topic, most of the children going through this sort of thing hide it, hence the 'Hi' hiding the 'Shh'.