Shanay Harris

As an artist, I am passionate about creating work around mental health and societal issues. I focus my work on these subjects because I personally suffer with mental health issues, and I aim to spread awareness to try and help people educate themselves about mental health and how today’s society effects people mentally, and in some cases physically. I typically focus on photography and paintings.

I enjoy using these mediums because photography allows me to show the literal side of things, and paintings allow me to create visual representations of things and use my photographs as inspiration for paintings. I will take an image of a model, use photoshop to edit the images to try and give a social media feel to the photos. With paintings, I sometimes use my images as inspiration, or I create floral pieces to represent natural beauty. An example of this would be my project called ‘Uncovering Natural Beauty’ that I completed in my first year of university. I took common insecurities and tried to represent them in a beautiful way to help people not feel self-conscious about themselves.

My project for this year is a continuation of my last project, The Unseen vs The Seen. I have revisited this project but focused on the things we see every day. I completed a series of street photography photo shoots, as well as using these photos to create physical art pieces such as a painting or drawing. The aim of my project is to capture candid moments in public, showing how people live their day to day lives, and how most people do the same thing.

A main focus point of mine throughout this project was the amount of people I noticed in public that are looking at their phones. I aimed to create pieces that represent how people are so engrossed in their phones and social media that they tend to miss nature and not pay attention to the natural beauty around them.