My work explores not only how intrusive thoughts can affect someone’s mental health, but also demonstrates how people like myself and others attempt to act as if nothing is wrong during such experiences. Often, intrusive thoughts and negative emotions are covered up with common sayings in order hide an individual’s true feelings. These intrusive thoughts are represented in my work through intaglio prints with dark marks and hands grabbing at either a figure or obscuring the individual’s face.

Accompanying these images are excerpts of poems by Hunter Summerall from his collection called It’s A Lonely Love, which are typewritten on the prints. This text is used not only as a typographical element but as a way of understanding how dark and extreme these emotions can feel to the individual. These poems surround the images and using a type writer to create them reiterates the delicacy of the intaglio prints as well as the dark imagery that is used throughout my body of work. They provide an explanation for how these depressive emotions interact with both the individual and the blanket sentence that is used. Once framed, these intaglio prints are covered and partially obscured by frames which are silkscreened with a single sentence in red; broken up among the individual prints.