Six Steps to Make a Change
This series draws inspiration from current events, first person stories, and my own experiences of watching peers suffer from addiction. I battle with myself to understand why I didn’t do more to help peers from being defeated by this disease. I realized I didn’t know they were struggling... I didn’t know how to help. Drug addiction in the US is increasing, we are living in a society of an opioid epidemic that is destroying lives, families, and communities.
This body of work is a response to this condition, a series of six fabricated metal rings; each represents one of the steps to make a change. In this series, the steps to making a change are applied to begin recovery from substance addiction. The process of making a change includes; pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. I represented each step by creating an interactive mechanism that visually and physically expresses each step through metal. I want the participants, to gain a better understanding of the difficulties to stay sober and the challenges faced to complete the journey to sobriety.
I have chosen to rename each of the six steps to further expresses my understanding of the process of change; Unknown, Discussion, Plan, Action, Maintain, Conquer. In conjunction to the interactive mechanism, I have connected a statistic about addiction that relates to the step. For example, Maintain, the wearer of the ring has to balance a rod that rests in between two sheets of metal that makes up the profile of ring; symbolically to represent sobriety. When and if the rod falls to either side, it is not balanced — signifying relapse. On one end of the rod is a single red stone, while the ring shank has 9 natural speckled stones of various colors to convey the 1 in 10 people that will experience addiction in their lives.
I hope that my pieces can help people to understand the steps to recovery in a different way — as if they were trying to complete the steps themselves.
