June 20, 2018
Annie Brandicourt is a graduate student in the School of Social Work She was recently recognized as the outstanding senior of her major, as well as the winner of the philanthropy award at the 2018 Social Science Gala. In her spare time, she creates beautiful collages.
I have always been into making things with my hands. When I was little, I would do a lot of beading, painting, sewing, knitting and various other hands-on art projects. When I got older, I started created big collages with whole cut out figures and words from magazines.
In high school, I took AP Studio Art and realized that I couldn’t use these collages as part of my portfolio without getting copyright information about the images from the magazines. In an effort to get around this barrier, I decided to cut up the pictures and use the simple colors, instead of the whole visual, to make a new figure.
I started out with faces of my friends and family, but now I make anything from pets to family portraits to wedding photos to landscapes. It’s a wonderful hobby because I can turn on some music and use a totally different part of my brain that is not often utilized by the work I do in my college classes.
Even better, creating art means that I have an actual, tangible, visually pleasing product at the end that I can be proud of. Having an outlet like this lessens my anxiety and helps me to place value in mentally healthy activities.
Eventually, I started doing commissions for people and it became sort of a side job all throughout college. However, I have decided to discontinue my commission work so that I will hopefully have time to work on the ideas and projects that mean more to me personally, such as celebrating positive body image, creating a series on the victims of police brutality and shedding light on mental illness through portrait depictions.