Sharing her personal experience with mental illness, senior studio art major Ashley Dick displayed her art exhibit last week.

Dick said she has been planning this show for about two years now, ever since she first learned about the show her sophomore year.

“Everyday is just dealing with the issues that I had and I wanted to translate that,” Dick said.

The art exhibit was a success, bringing in students and faculty all three days.

“It means a lot to me,” Dick said. “My professors and the chair of the art department came in to show support.”

Dick showed a variety of artwork in her exhibit such as paintings with contrast of dark and bright colors, broken teacups and sculptures with lights included.

“I’ve got the understanding section, the statistics section,” Dick said. “It’s all grouped together.”

Dick provided different note cards with all of her artwork that stated facts and statistics regarding mental health.

“I want to help people understand mental illness, in the hopes that they can help out someone else,” she said.

Christopher Kahler, department chair of art and design, went to the exhibit the first two days it was open.

“I was very impressed with how well she was talking with the people that came to her exhibit, she was very professional,” Kahler said.

Kahler brought students with him to the art exhibit, expressing what a great job Dick did with her work.

“I thought it was important, but also an interesting way to handle this topic,” he said. “It’s important to not avoid the topic of mental illness, because this is something many students can relate to.”

He said she took a lot of risks with the show and it was very exciting for him to see her work.

“I had her for my Painting 2 Class, I only knew her skills with painting so I was very pleasantly surprised to see her sculpting skills,” Kahler said.

Dick said she thinks this is a good first step in helping opening people’s eyes to mental illness and how many people are affected by it.

She said it’s not always effective trying to help people understand by just talking to them, so she decided to use visual representations.

“It’s more effective to show an image for people to grasp onto and realize it’s something we need to talk about,” she said.

Dick brought in a white sheet to put over her desk for everyone that visited her exhibit to sign, as a way to show others that there are more people out there that would understand.

“If we can help it, we need to stop people from hurting themselves. People feel like they’re so different and they’re not,” Dick said. “We just need to spread a little bit more understanding, which is why I chose this particular topic to portray in my art work.”

Sisi Pascarella can be reached at 581-2812 or smpascarella@eiu.edu.