Mathilda Hana Attal Overcoming Mental and Physical Limitations

I have not felt confident enough in the past year to consistently exercise the skills I know I have. When I switched schools from an intense and rigorous art curriculum mid pandemic, I had lost most of the progress and the portfolio I’ve worked on since the eighth grade. Thus, my initial reaction to hearing of City-As-School High School’s internship at the Art Students League was curiosity and reluctance. Although I have felt both mental and physical limitations and boundaries with my artmaking during COVID, which I so often use as therapy or coping, I believe it has also shown I can be resilient in times of extreme un-creativity and boredom.

I am most interested in making sustainable and accessible sloth-like fashion, pottery, jewelry making, knitting, charcoal drawing, etching, film photography, film making, and many other mediums. I do not yet have a clear concept of what type of career I would like to pursue in my adulthood. I would say my greatest inspirations are Jean Michel Basquiat, Wong Kar-Wai, Michelle Browder, Yayoi Kusama, and many others.

I am very interested in pottery, especially Kintsugi, a Japanese art form where you repair broken porcelain things with gold paint- which I find sustainable. I am interested in the whole ceramics process of firing and reusing old clay, foraging for natural clays, and the manipulation and fragility of the artform.