“Best Days Of Your Life, highlights and focuses on a scarred generation filling UK schools, illustrating the alarming rise in children hospitalised through self-harm, indiscriminately affecting all socio-economic demographics”

 

 

Best Days Of Your Life

Headlines alert us to the decline in adolescent mental health, statistics chart soaring figures of children hospitalised. Stress, Pressure, Bullying, Social Media are identified as factors.

Best Days Of Your Life, highlights and focuses on a scarred generation filling UK schools, illustrating the alarming rise in children hospitalised through self-harm, indiscriminately affecting all socio-economic demographics.

The visibility of Mental Health, an ‘invisible illness’, is depicted through this group of 18-20 year olds, who all self-harmed throughout their secondary school careers. At first glance, an average looking group of teens, who like other sufferers, cover-up, reply they are ‘fine’, and who are perceived to be enjoying the best days of their lives.

Best Days Of Your Life, also questions the wider mental health balance of exposure and awareness. It examines the intimate choice of covering-up or revealing the invisible pain and questions the observers’ choice of awareness level and visual clarity when ‘seeing’ our children, their scarred generation and those around us.

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good”

Carl Sagan

Jude Wacks has exhibited Best Days Of Your Life at:

Head Room Cafe, 89 Golders Green Rd, Golders Green, London NW11 8EN: 1st May – 31 May 2019
LCC Degrees Show 2018, Elephant & Castle, London, SE1 6SB: 30th May – 2nd June 2018
The Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London, E1 6QR:  21st June – 25th June 2018