Rumination

Rumination is short for mental stress and the scientific term for anxiety, which is the title of my project

At first when you look at the picture it doesn’t really look like theres a monster there, once you take a closer look at the picture you start thinking that the monster is protruding out of the head. The representation of three hands is suppose to represent more then one monster, each monster could represent a different thing we struggle with that is all mental and in the head, could be anxiety, OCD, depression, Bipolar, PTSD, etc. In a way I mainly wanted to show how well we are at hiding it, everyone has that monster in their head that dictates the way we all speak, move, and the choices we make. Everything I drew and created in my collage all has a purpose and a meaning, down to the features in the eyes. Starting with the hair, I chose the black and white stripped hair because white hair in younger people is often associated with stress and that was the reason i chose the hair color I did the style was completely random. In the eyes I wanted to show how you start to feel like you yourself are fading away starting to not see the happy and exciting color you used to, you can interpret it how ever it relates to you. For me when I was a kid i feel like everything was so much more colorful and exciting and as you get older and develop all these new feelings like anxiety and depression you start to see less of that. And I thought the best way to represent that was to get rid of the iris in the eye and make it look as if its not looking at anything, and chose the color grey as a representation of the color fading.
The Monsters protruding out of the head trying to get the pieces back together are trying to hide back inside of the head, grabbing the pieces to put back together. The reason why the hands have long nails was to give it an ere feeling and I tried to represent witch nails and when i looked up witch nails I saw long black nails, and thought it would be a good representation for the monsters or something that's “evil”. The background is representing a fear of mine and its the fear of feeling like you’re running out of time, I feeling left behind, not keeping up, or feel like i should be in a much further place then I should be right now even though i'm barely starting my 20s. The candles on the side are also representation of running out of time and feeling like its running out fast because of how fast the candles burn out and also represent burning out yourself. Finally I added the two birds on the candles to represent freedom, birds flying are often associated with freedom.