Essay written by Sara Prinsloo

A5 landscape booklet with images 

Forward by Gary Mansfield 

‘Cut Before It’s Grown’ is a self-reflective series which explores my mental health and lived experiences; it is a journey into an unconventional adolescence and those ‘things’ that just stay with you forever. The aim is to make sense of my own life experiences: dealing with grief, coming from a working-class background and the impacts of being reckless as a youth. This essay will not discuss such exposures in detail but rather highlight them to conclude a body of work in reaction to key topics which have arisen through them. As I have been inspired by a number of artists who have used art to embody similar issues from a subjective point of view, I have credited each of them throughout this piece.