Hayden Sawh ’22 has been an avid artist since the age of four. She took a class at the Berkeley Museum, and the museum used one of her pieces as a leading feature for the children’s division of the museum. She explained, “Seeing that happen made me really want to be serious about art.”
Sawh joined the Deerfield Arts Department as a freshman in Visual and Performing Arts Teacher Mercedes Taylor’s “Introduction to Studio Art” class, in which Ms. Taylor quickly recognized that Sawh is “really invested and dedicated” to the arts. “She always wanted to grow as an artist,” Ms. Taylor remarked. “Hayden really puts in a lot of time and effort into her work. She’s very serious about what she does,” she added.
Sawh’s desire to open up conversations about difficult topics drives her passion for art. She focuses on projects that “deal with [her] personal emotions’’ as well as “things that [she feels] aren’t discussed enough within art and topics that are a little bit harder to talk about in words.”
Sawh’s most recent collection is an exhibition displayed outside of Hess 123, inspired by her interviews with individuals with mental disorders. This project started in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Sawh was inspired by the increase of awareness around mental health. “I struggled a lot with mental health during that time,” Sawh said, “I knew that a lot of my friends were [struggling] as well so I wanted to make a series just focusing on that.”
Sawh attended a pre-college program at Tufts University, where she gained insight into how to start an exhibition piece. She began reaching out to people who confided in her about their own experiences with mental disorders and consented to Sawh anonymously publishing their quotes for the exhibition. Sawh explained that she collected quotes from a wide range of people between the ages of sixteen through fifty. “That was my favorite part about this entire project,” Sawh stated. “It’s nice to try and tell people ‘yes, go to counseling – talk, talk, talk’ but instead of telling people who are struggling with mental health what to do, which puts an obligation for them to do something, I wanted to hear what they had to say themselves. What do they want?” She expressed that to “depict them in a way that [she] thinks captures their essence” is a responsibility she is certainly grateful for.
Her artistic process was inspired by inkblot tests, and she intentionally used acrylic paint in order to attain the effect of vein structures. “I really wanted to make it clear that these people I’m depicting are not their mental disorder. Their mental disorder does not make them,” Sawh revealed. “They are living, breathing people just like somebody who might not have to deal with mental disorders.” She also deliberately selected each color according to color psychology; she recounted how one color can represent countless emotions. “None of the things that I did were unintentional,” she stated.
Sawh expressed her joy after revealing the finished product to those she interviewed. “It made me extremely happy having some of them say ‘this is exactly how I feel’ and ‘this is really relatable.’” Carson Bynum ’23 said that he felt as though observing the exhibition “was a great learning experience” as “someone who doesn’t struggle with any major mental health disorders.” Bynum was captivated by two pieces in particular, Reserved and Solitude, in which he believes Sawh “does a really great job” representing the quotes that accompany the artwork. Ms. Taylor noticed “moments of quiet,” when students viewed the exhibition. To her, this demonstrated that they are “connecting with the work.”
Sawh’s next series will likely be centered around environmental sustainability, but she plans to continue her project about mental health. Her work with encouraging conversations around mental health has certainly impacted both those she is inspired by in her pieces, and her viewers.