Green River Artists Express The Anxiety of Isolation
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Green River artists, confined to their homes, have been coping with the stresses of isolation through art.
On March 13, 2020, the state of Washington made its first attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Teachers and scholars bid each other farewell for a four week break, no way of knowing what had yet to come.
Just three months into the lockdown, the CDC said 40 percent of adults reported struggling with mental health or substance abuse, up from 20 percent in 2019.
Nearly one year from the initial lockdown, many students and teachers from Green River have come to rely on art for its creative expression and other therapeutic attributes.
Cindy Small, a Green River instructor for more than 20 years who is retiring at the end of this school year, has spent most of lockdown in her West Seattle studio working on personal and professional projects.
Small expected a decrease in student involvement with the transition to online education, but actually experienced a flood of new students and a drastic spike in student involvement.
“You can see [the students] using art to express the feelings brought up by the lockdown,” said Small.
She provided The Current with a collection of student works, many of which depict the struggles of isolation and anxiety produced by a widespread loss of income and socialization. One student, Jennifer Zirko, created a drawing for class which represented her feelings of instability and confusion.
“When will I have this figured out,” Zirko asked herself in regards to her artistic expression and personal need to move her life forward in a digital world.
She asked herself this question continually as she worked on her drawing, which became clear in the final product. Zirko thought that her piece “naturally evolved to reflect [her] struggle.”
Another student, Destiny Hyatt, has also found art to be therapeutic and important for maintaining mental stability during this crisis.
“I felt so trapped within my home but more importantly in my head,” said Hyatt about her time before creating.
Unfortunately, just because art helps her does not mean Hyatt is always available to give time and energy to her drawings. “Unfortunately,” she said of the difficulty managing her life in a bubble, “I haven’t made art in 3 months.”
While Small, Zirko, and Hyatt have used drawing and painting to relieve stress, some artists have turned to music as an artistic outlet.
Jennifer Joy, in her second year at Green River, has used the art of music to relieve stress and refocus on her world outside the Zoom screen.
Joy, Green River’s International Recreation Coordinator, will turn to her piano after a long work day. “Playing the piano requires dedication, but it is also somewhat leisurely and transcendental in experience.”
Due to physical isolation, both students and teachers have turned to art to combat loneliness and unease. The arts in all their variety have greatly softened the blows of anxiety and disease, supporting individual growth and much-needed reflection.
Jennifer Zirko and Destiny Hyatt, Green River students and avid artists, have used their experiences in isolation to create works reminiscent of the national crisis of depression and anxiety.
Hyatt’s work is comprised of dark ink scratched into a paper surface, images of skulls bleeding from a blindfolded face. “Slowly. His mind had begun to blind him,” reads a caption scrawled onto masking tape placed just above the drawn cloth bindings.
Zirko’s piece captures the emotionality of the lockdown, blue and blacks mixing to form a woman lost in space, looking to the ground for stability.
References:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm#:~:text=The%20coronavirus%20disease%202019%20(,same%20period%20in%202019.
