CCBC students who participated in studying Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh submitted their work of any genre, in any discipline to be considered for our CBC Spring Student Showcase!
Essential Guide for Getting Through Fear (a companion guide) Study Guide for Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm
artist statement
The class made a companion guide to the book Fear. Each student was responsible for a chapter. They summarized and then supported or refuted Hanh's claim in the chapter using one outside source. They also contributed a citation for the source and discussion questions for their respective chapter.
Maintaining silence is difficult, especially when speaking up ensures freedom of mind. This painting titled "khamoshi (silence) was created after I'd slowly come to terms with the existence of conditional love and my fear of losing it since I no longer met those conditions. I choose to stay silent and, therefore, remain fearful.
This poem is an ode to the last women you gossiped about; the kind some feminists are too afraid to stand alongside, that girl in high school that everyone loved to pretend had some scary secrete, or the one who says a dirty joke in public loud enough to drown out whatever cynical thing I whispered. This poem is meant to act as the voice often lost within a room, when someone talks behind the back of that type of women. Begging the question, what about her is so scary?
Chalk Pastel on Toned Paper, 12"x18". This drawing connects to the fear of being isolated in an unfamiliar place- the past life has been burned and reduced to ashes, and there is no where to go but forward, into the depths of the unknown.
Emotions many times are cut off out of fear of losing control. But the only way to move on and to grow is to let go of control and heal your inner child
This is about the hurt of lost friendships and severed connections with people we used to love. Coming from parents, breakups, or falling outs the pain still remains unless you choose to work through them
Acrylic Painting on Masonite, 24"x36". The wistful face of Mother Nature looks onto the world she created as it is destroyed before her eyes. The fear of the ongoing climate crisis ravages the world around us, as we are forced to observe.
The piece is about a lover in a relationship living a double life. In the foreground sits a woman (my girlfriend’s portrait) sitting and staring forward in a dark room with subtle emotion; she isn’t smiling nor crying, but she doesn’t look happy. In the background, there’s a silhouette of a man (my figure) standing in an open doorway, with a rose in his hand; which shows a sign of love. In his shadow, he’s holding a gun instead of a rose; which shows a sign of danger. I was interested in letting viewers interpret the piece themselves and express what they believe is going on. Some believed that the man in the doorway is fighting for the woman he loves, while some believed that the woman feared the man she loves and the gun showed a sign of domestic violence.
Parasitic Dermatophobia is a fear of insects or parasites infecting one's body and living just beneath the skin. My encounters with cave crickets and water centipedes within my home haunt me, seizing my body into a frozen stance until the bug crawls out of sight, leaving me in an itchy, paranoid state for the rest of the day. I wanted to explore this feeling of one's home and place of comfort taken over by unseen foreign bodies, the frustrating, foot-stomping dread that comes from a lack of control and inability to feel safe in your own skin. The only solution is to destroy, to tear open the body, rip up the carpets, scratch out that everlasting itch of raw fear and pull up every aspect of your home to ensure every bug is dead. My sculpture is of a woman as she lays prone on her side, bugs burrowing in and out of her skin as she tears herself open in pursuit of eradicating the foreign insects. She is a personification of unbridled terror, desperate to rid herself of the threat her home.
My piece shows a woman silence by what she fears. The woman’s fear is interpreted by the hand caressing her cheek with her mouth blurred out preventing her from speaking. In the piece, her expression is dull and lifeless as she accepts her fate that comes along with what she fears. She cannot escape what comes next.
Humans always have that voice behind your head, your intrusive thoughts. Sometimes they get the better of us and fill our minds with nothing but worry.
