Students bare their heart and minds
family was finally able to understand my perspective and my feelings towards the situation. I think it gave us a lot of closure,” said former MLC art student Niamh Fraser of her personal and provocative artwork, titled Saturday Morning Ataxophobia.
Her graduating sculptural work is showing in Pulse, the annual exhibition of work by last year’s Year 12 visual art students. Ataxophobia is an extreme fear of mess and disorder and her artwork represents the mess of a kitchen and the rot and decay of food.
Niamh said it was “the direct result of my parents’ separation, physically representing my family’s mental state, which in turn worsened mine”.
Now majoring in fine arts at Curtin University, she said the mess her family was left in was represented by the mess
left behind in the kitchen, “illustrating the end of my once comfortable and organised life”.
This deeply personal artwork is just one example of the 60 works chosen for Pulse that allow us to see into the hearts and minds of young people, to see their response to the world around them and how they interpret it.
Coco Boshard, a graduate from John
XXIII, used Grant
Wood’s American Gothic (1930) as her inspiration to comment on the world’s dependency on technology. “American Gothic was created during the Great Depression, when people struggled to adapt to a different life,” she said.
In her work, titled Disconnect, Coco parodies the struggle and disconnection with reality by replacing the pitchfork with an electrical plug and
the woman with a robot.
“Technology has taken a toll on mental and physical relationships,” she said. “We have a terrible social disconnect in our lives.”
Coco is about to embark on a European trip to discover great works of art in Europe before studying architecture.
Almost 300 student works were submitted for this year’s exhibition, with 60 chosen from 36 schools across WA. Themes represented in their work covered issues such as connections to culture, body and social pressures, misogyny, consumerism and the environment.
Pulse opens this weekend at Art Gallery of WA (AGWA) with Pulsefest celebrating youth creativity across fashion, music, writing, performance and dance. It is show until October 6.