For eighteen-year-old Veronica Avent, art gives her pure feelings of joy and a sense of accomplishment, which has helped her decide art is the right path for her.
The Leeming Senior High graduate has been creating art for most of her life and now hopes to embrace it as a career.
Last year Ms Avent participated in the Pulse Perspectives exhibition which featured some of the best year 12 visual arts graduates from 29 schools across Western Australia.
The chosen works showcase art from young people that influence, empower and shape the world we live in.
Ms Avent will be exhibiting her artwork I Spy for the first time at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from March 7 through to June 2020.
I Spy was the artist’s final art piece for her school art ATAR in year 12.
Being her final piece, Ms Avent said she wanted to create something that would sum up her life memories.
“The whole art work is almost a play on words of “A trip down memory lane” having bits of them scattered through it,” she said.
“People are able to follow my journey by having their own memories come out as they wander through my own.”
Her featured work is a surrealistic tale about how Ms Avent observes her spiritual sense of place, with a few hidden messages that are close to the artist’s heart.
Some of Ms Avent’s hidden messages include two young native children within the scenery who represent the artist’s ancestors and a fire place during her last week in Papua New Guinea when she was only four-years-old.
“Having this opportunity given to me has given new light to my art pieces, I have always felt shy or scared that others may judge my work and ridicule it but now seeing it be hung up in front of the public, but now I understand that this is what art is, it’s something to be shown to the world, to be judged, hated or loved,” she said.
“I want people to remember their past and understand what makes them who they are, the experiences that they had gone through which have allowed them to grow into the person that they have become.”
The school graduate is now undertaking a teaching degree at university with the hope of becoming a full time secondary art teacher.
“Knowing that there are many other teenagers out there who feel confused about themselves and don’t know how they fit in this world, I want to help them through art.”
