Artist Statement

Mental health is a critical component to healthy living. The experience of stress, anxiety, panic, fear, depression, and other overwhelming emotions are often internalized and are not expressed to others. They are held inside, drowning, and suffocating a person’s headspace until they are often in too deep. Everyone has something lurking below the surface, and the depths of these emotions, can be devastating.

In my previous works, I’ve employed the imagery of fish as a representation for my own headspace. Psychological Ecosystems is a continuation of this metaphor, drawing a connection between the different depths of fish ecosystems, and the depths of the human mind. Through self-portraiture, I present an external stoic emotion to disguise the depths of declining mental health. Assigning fish and their ecosystems to internalized human emotions and matching the type of water and species of fish to a severity level of the internal experience, it represents the drowning feeling experienced as people fall into the depths of mental illness. Through the rising water levels across the five works and the increasingly eerie feeling projected by each type of fish, the viewer can relate to the internal panic, stress, and anxiety that everyone experiences at some point in their own lives.

Phoebe Clark

About the Artist

Phoebe Clark is a mixed-media artist who explores the representation of movement and processes, emotional connections to nature, the female form and inner beauty in her work. Employing symbolism of fish as a symbol representing herself, her experiences, emotions, and creative stories, Clark’s current work draws connections between her own body and the body of a fish in a dreamlike (or nightmarish) assemblage of pieces.

Born in Gaithersburg Maryland, and currently a Psychology major and Studio Arts minor at Loyola University Maryland, in Baltimore, Phoebe has had an interest in art since she first learned to hold a crayon. Beginning as an acrylic painter, creating highly saturated pieces varying in texture, today her work primarily combines collaged book paper, Micron pens, Acrylic paint, watercolor paint and Prismacolor pencils.