Identity Project

Everyone deals with stress on some level or another, and everyone deals with it differently. I am that person who has no specific stress release tactic, and because of this I oftentimes become stressed out over things that seem small to others, but seem big to me. At times I will get so stressed that I become almost non-functional, and this disfunction becomes like a web which crosses over into other people's lives, consuming them with stress just as I have been consumed. The all consuming nature of stress makes it a major characteristic of my identity, and in terms of my most prominent stress, the bulk of my burden has been caused by my decision to go back for a second degree in art with a concentration in graphic design at the age of 25. While being an older student is stressful enough, I put additional stress upon myself by trying to produce what I think is the best of my ability at my skill level. I look at this opportunity to go back to school as my last chance to do something which makes me happy and almost as my last hope. If I am not successful with graphic design then what is next? I can not just keep going back to school. I have to make something work and this will be it. My process of making any art piece is very slow which is always stressful because this makes time management always an issue, this causes me to have little or no time for myself, friends or family. When I am not working on a project for school I have the stresses of work, as I must cope with co-worker who either do not want to work, do not know how to do something, or just want to gossip. These are just some of the main stresses,and as you can see, it is the minor stresses which ultimately end up combining into what I would call the "daily stresses." Permeating through my very being, and manifested in the trials of daily existence, this is the culmination of my emotional weight: the stressed web that is my identity.

Stress Web

For my identity project I wanted to create something which would represent both stress and tension, and how those infleunces can either make or break an individual. In doing so, I ultimately wanted to create a web, in which after its construction was complete I could literally break through, in a act representative of my conquest over the never ending battle of stress. To begin, I initially set out on this endeavor through literally constructing a stress web, as I cut 48 white plastic bags into strips, with each strip being a different length and width to refelct how each stress effects me with different levels of severity. After completing this, the next step was to record the factors and influences which cause my stress on each strip. Writing these factors in red, blue, and black markers, I initially selected the color to write at random. Nonetheless, as I progressed, I soon noticed my unconscious use of the red marker to emphasize more intense stresses. In continuing my process though, upon completion of this grueling process (which took several hours), I then connected all of the bags together by creating a gigantic web out of them. This was done to represent how all of these stresses are connected, and how the culmination of these can cause one large stress. After several hours of tying the bags together, it was then time to hang the web. The web was hung in site specific area located in the backyard of my parents home. I choose this due to the fact that my stress stems from my parents, as their stress oftentimes becomes my stress, and at times, they themselves actually become the cause of my stress. With the web being approximately 8-9 ft wide and 6 feet tall, it was hung between two pine trees in my parents backyard in the middle of the night. I chose to construct the web during the day because that is when my stress begins, and hung the web at night because that is when I am at my breaking point. It was important to me to only include one light source because the goal of reaching the light represents overcoming stress, and ultimately becoming a successful graphic designer. The actual process of breaking the web took around 30-40 minutes, and while I had no idea of the amount of strength a web made of plastic bags would have, I had my entire weight on the web at all times, and used all of my force to break the web. After seeing the strength this web could have using only 48 bags, for the final resting place of this web I am considering making a hammock out of it. Of course, if I did this I would have to add more bags, however I think it would be a positive thing for my stress web to make the transformation into something I could use for relaxation.