A showcase of artworks from Year 12 students across NSW shows teenagers are grappling with the impact of lockdowns, isolation and the unknowns of a new variant.
ARTEXPRESS 2022 opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on Thursday and features 43 pieces selected from 8440 submissions in 2021.
Lockdown, a series of 25 intimate oil-on-paper portraits by Grace Shattock, capture the "emotional experience throughout the pandemic".
Ms Shattock, from Loreto Kirribilli, sought to capture the feeling of "standing in a crowd, avoiding cases (of COVID-19), catching glimpses" into the subjects' individuality.
"They're all clustered together, but their gaze is avoidant - from each other and the audience," she said.
The overall work should leave people with an overall feeling of "unease" and "discomfort".
An intricate and timely work by Kaitlyn Matea, Stop The Spread, uses textile craft to depict the unknown of the mutating coronavirus.
Her work, a bundle of grey and red hand-crocheted coronavirus cells spilling from a large face mask, fashioned from a series of stitched together surgical masks, taps into home-spun anxieties.
"There's (also) a coronavirus mutation creeping out of the work," Ms Matea explains. She is not being literal.
Matea, who usually works with paints, first learned to crochet at 10, and took to it again during the 2020 lockdown, before landing on the medium for her major work.
She said 2021 presented its own difficulties for her year group, and two years of online learning made the year "that much harder".
"Year 12 is a lot of work, a lot of pressure, and when you can't see your teachers face to face, it makes it all that much harder."
Lincoln Davie from Nowra Christian School said his "tight knit" year group came together to support each other through 2021.
His work, Adoration of Adolescence 2021, are five evocative portraits of his classmates, drawn in soft pastel pencils on black Stonehenge paper.
The bond of his year group allowed him to find subjects to "sit down for me and display how they felt".
"It was unique the way my school, out of the way of Sydney, handled it. I think we did pretty good."
In some ways he feels regional students may have had an "easier time" than those living in the city.
"Lockdown wasn't quite as harsh for us," he reflected.
ARTEXPRESS 2022 opens at the Art Gallery of NSW on February 3.
