I created this work because I don’t see much art that accurately depicts how I personally experience obsessive compulsive thoughts. It’s a lot of the reason I create art in general. I want to express thoughts and feelings that sometimes cannot be explained in words alone. While repetition was the basis of the project, what I really wanted to show in this piece was space. I wanted to show how much space in your mind obsessive compulsive thoughts can take up and why it is nearly impossible to ignore them.

           

The pictures on the front represent things I enjoy thinking about while the single repeated picture of a light switch on the back represents an obsessive-compulsive thought I don’t want to have, but takes up all the space in my mind anyway. I used cardboard to make the boxes and white yarn to string it up. The mobile at the top is made of a wooden bar and a metal hook so it can rotate. I used both acrylic and spray paints, along with markers on paper for the pictures on the front.

 

I hope to do similar projects in the future because it was an interesting process. I’ve never started an art piece without a clear vision in mind first, so to see something develop into a completely different piece from start to finish was thought provoking. I hope to apply what I’ve learned in this piece to others I make in the future.