As an art therapist by trade, I get to work with some amazing individuals. Often, our time is spent looking at relationships at their core- the good, the bad, and the very dangerous. All too often, I am working with my clients on building up their boundaries. When I heard the prompt, my immediate reaction was that I wanted to shore up these boundaries. Make them stronger. The stories I am told are often surface level at first, but when we dig deeper in our safe, therapeutic relationship, we often uncover things that are left festering, ugly and rotting inside. These emotions stem from unresolved traumas that get stored inside of our brains, helping us make bad decisions over and over again. For this prompt, my concept is to take the image of the ideal beauty in the sculptural world- perhaps the famous sculpture of Venus de Milo- and transform it into something that is flawed, and less than the ideal beauty she was meant to be.

Further, I want to create this sculpture as a series of 3 wall hangings. One represents the initial trauma that is the broken boundary, or an absence of the boundaries needed to keep this beauty safe. Another represents the act of healing, where more boundaries are present- maybe even some really rigid boundaries around the wall hanging. The final piece will represent resilience, with boundaries that are present and strong, but perhaps penetrable to those that the beauty allows within her boundaries.