Eliza Colmes (2015) created a collection of works entitled “Delirium” which received the Edwin Hamill Award for Best Graduating Senior in the Creative Arts department as well as the Maris Award for the Arts in the 2015 Senior Showcase, as part of her senior thesis in ARTS 499 taught by Gary Bolding. In her artist statement, she explains:
“I am a visual communicator projecting imagery from the dark place in my imagination. I have always believed that this imagery was more than the product of nightmares or some elaborate fantasy. These demons that I am depicting are representations of all that is dark and destructive within me. I am an observer of my own internal struggle. I have a common tendency to indulge myself in the poisonous thoughts that tug at my ego. Rather than to make a futile attempt to ignore my struggle or try and distract myself, I work through the darkness. I confront my spiritual aches and pains and I study them. I give them a name, a face, a physical body. If I can give things like fear, anger, animosity, anxiety, a physical body and a name, I can see them better and feel more exert control over them. I visualize myself physically reining them in. I also do this in order to and exorcising these things them from my soul. I make the intangible disturbances that swim the psyche tangible. I put them in a species and a class. This process is a way for me to keep these things from eroding the light in my soul. I’m using imagery from my nightmares because they are subconscious projections of our existing fears and anxieties. I spend a lot of time with each piece in the making, and in that production I have a lot of time to sit and reflect while I work on the source of my darkness, why it is dictating certain aspects of my life, why they obstruct me in this earth walk temporal existence. My intention in sharing this intensely personal body of work is to incite fantasy and feelings, and create an intimate interaction that mimics one we would have with our own soul, with all of it’s darkness and light.”
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