MELANIE Hain started planning her Visual Arts major work three years in advance.
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She wanted to use her work to tell the story of her late grandfather's experience of Alzheimer's Disease and how it affected her family.
"It was a really long and difficult journey and I knew it was something I wanted to reflect in my artwork at some stage," she said.
"I can talk about it, but I could not get that emotional side out.
"I thought 'How do I share his journey in an artistic way that is engaging and has a really beautiful side to it, although it is such a sad disease'."
The former Warners Bay High student's final product, the ceramic work Fragility, is one of 50 from across NSW to be selected for the virtual reality ARTEXPRESS exhibition, which allows viewers to experience artworks as though walking through an actual gallery.
Melanie's former classmate Tahnee Marriott's photomedia work The Nature of Ambiguity and Belmont Christian College student Hannah-Kate Proctor's sculpture Detachment from Her Origin were also selected.
"It's a massive shock and I still can't believe it," said Melanie, whose work was on display before COVID-19 at the Museum of Art and Culture Lake Macquarie.
"I didn't think people would take that much interest for it to be where it is at the moment.
"I'm really happy with how it turned out - I was told it would be 3D scanned [for the exhibition] but I was not sure what the end result would be, it's something they've never done before."
Melanie said in addition to planning, it took three weeks to create her work, which is three brains with protruding tentacles and coils.
"It took one week to construct the piece, it's so fragile and big it was important to make sure it did not dry out and crack before the first firing," she said.
"Then it took a week to dry out and a week to do the final colouring.
"The colours are what brings it together - the brains are a darker colour and as the tentacles go out the colour starts lightening up.
"The tentacles and coils coming off represent the memories, some of them shorter and some of them longer, deteriorating away."
Melanie said her original designs felt "too logical", but the more personal completed work made her feel "relief".
"It was a healing process to do this and made me reflect on what had happened," she said.
"It gave me some kind of comfort. This is what happened, but he is better off where he is now than struggling day to day."
Melanie said the process was "emotionally challenging" at times and thanked her teacher Morgan Read and parents for their support.
"There were times I'd look at it and say 'I can't do this anymore', but my teachers really pushed me past that.
"I could not have done it without them."
Tahnee's work was hanging in the Art Gallery of NSW when COVID-19 hit, but she said the virtual exhibition meant it could be viewed across the globe.
Using her camera's macro lens she took hundreds of photos of flowers, which she narrowed down to six.
"I got close so the photos were blurred," she said.
"It's showing a side of nature people don't usually see because up so close it looks abstract."