Artist Statement
Alan Watts once said, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with
it, and join the dance.” I did not realize how much “change” played a role in my aspirations until this year.
One of my first memories of my dream job was when I was in elementary school and thought that I
wanted to be a fashion designer. As I grew older and life became more complicated I discovered that
maybe I did not want to be a fashion designer, but rather an inventor or a chef. Fashion designing did not
seem as fun as it used to, and after watching countless re-runs of, “Say Yes to the Dress” and, “America’s
Next Top Model”, I realized that I did not want to be part of the fashion industry because of all the drama
associated with it. There were multiple other careers that I aspired to - such as an architect, interior
designer, olympic swimmer, musician, priest, artist - but somehow they always seemed to change. This
change between thinking that I wanted to be something and then changing my mind remained a constant
in my life up until the start of high school.
When I started ninth grade, I was nervous. I was coming into a huge school, I was pretty shy, and
I had just started feeling comfortable in middle school. I remember going into biology class and thinking,
“Wow, I might actually like high school after all.” Biology sparked my curiosity. I had understood almost
everything in my classes before high school, but this was the first subject where I could see that not
everything was on the surface. In biology, when you think that you have gotten to the smallest particle,
there’s even smaller parts waiting for you underneath. For example, in ninth grade biology, I thought that
the organelles inside the cell were the smallest part of life we knew about. However, as a senior in AP
Biology, I learned that there are, in fact, even smaller particles that make organelles work. There are ions,
proteins, and a lot of other systems that make those organelles function. The depth of this subject and my
own curiosity have been an integral part of my life for the last four years and have led me to decide that I
want to become a biologist once I graduate college.
The inspiration for my concentration is this idea of changing dreams, with each still life
representing a career that I wanted to have at some point. Each piece is fractured in order to show that my
goal has changed. I needed to break the fractured dreams down more to understand them. In Anatomy and
AP Biology we perform dissections in order to better understand an organism as a whole. These pieces
are like dissections of different parts of my life. You need to see them in order to fully comprehend who I
am. The final piece, a microscope that is unfractured, represents my current goal to be a biologist. I used
graphite to allude to the fact that at times my dreams seemed black and white. Once I looked at them
closely, however, they were more intricate than I had imagined. Each piece is also mounted between a
piece of plexiglass and a piece of acrylic styrene to resemble microscope slides - another reference to my
dream of becoming a biologist. Mounting the pieces on the “microscope slides” also shows that
examining things more closely impacts the way that we see them, because the more in-depth that I looked
into my aspirations, the more that I realized that some of them were not meant for me.