ib visual arts

julia loughbrough

As I approach the end of my high school education, I come face to face with the fact that I am growing up. With this comes reminiscing on the past and looking to others with more experience to look to the future. This also comes with the unveiling of events and ideas that corrupt the naivety and innocence that childhood stereotypically holds; what adults and young adults have to come to terms with and deal with. Through this idea of a loss of innocence through time, I framed my exhibition as a look into the past, the present and the future of my family and I. I used colour, with its vibrancy representing the imagination and strength of the memories that I look at from my childhood with. Dull and muted colours represent experiences and parts of my life that I am yet to experience.

In this exhibition, I intend to present a framed reality of childhood through the concept of looking back on what is remembered and what is forgotten. The exhibition will be a ‘wonder-wall’ of memories, with artworks set out in a way to represent a time-line, moving from the naivety and colours of childhood to the uncertainty of adulthood and the future. This ‘future’ being correlated with duller colours and a more loose painting style. The repeating symbol and motif of circles symbolises the cycle of time, generations and time passing, as seen throughout exhibition, both within the artworks and the presentation. The wide variety of art forms aims to be representative of the wide amount of experiences and the vastly different experiences one can have.

The first artwork: “in stitches”, created through a mix of printing and embroidery, represents a child’s unrestrained imagination, with fish representing ideas and thoughts ‘swimming’ freely around a child’s mind while using the motif of koi to show calmness and freedom. “running wild” uses photographs of buildings through the perspective of a child where everything is much larger and more grand and consisting of digitally brightened colours and composition. This artwork, like “in stitches”, represents the start of childhood, where one’s imagination runs freely without bounds. “flowing thoughts” is created through the combination of embroidery and the use of lino printing, ties together a number of years of childhood, focusing on the physical changes, rather than the influence on one’s mind and sense of self. “untamed” is a drawing of a bike in an overgrown garden, emblematic of how as one grows up, one tends to forget memories. The absence of colour in this work emphasises this within the scope of this exhibition and acts as a visual contrast to the other artworks within the idea of childhood. The placement on the ‘metaphorical time-line’ also is significant as it is placed before the centralised work of “inception”, which represents the present. “inception” is comprised of three photographs of the eyes of three members of my family, and is not only a visual comparison of different times in our lives but also suggests the cycle of life and influence of time on the individual. “orthodox” begins the ‘future’ section of the time line and is another black fine line drawing, depicting an old cathedral that my family has visited, and aims to act as a metaphor for beauty in age, and that despite loss of innocence and colour, that the complexities, shown through detail and line work, becomes a new focus. “frosted” is the first of two acrylic paintings depicting ‘the faces of the past’; the elderly and the aged, painted with loose painting style, representative of the uncertainty of my future yet the possibility that it holds. “1947”, the second acrylic painting depicts my grandmother, painted from memory, illustrates the changes in the mind that happen as memories age and fade. The final artwork completes the time-line: “blue skies always”, acts as time to reflect on what has happened, and that in the end everything will be ok represented through the bright blue sky.