The best laid plans of mice and men…
So as always, trying to plan anything in life normally causes many things to get in the way, especially when it comes to art!
My intention was to keep my blog going with at least 1 or 2 posts a month, maybe even trying to push to a weekly post - however as soon as I would book some time to write about my current projects, work and life get in the way. This is definitely the curse of the self-employed and jobs coming along like buses.
I have been beavering away planning and working on various projects - one of which is linking me back with my good friend and painter Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/rgjones23/) - who was part of my Tales from the Loop V2 exhibition - we are working on producing a zine responding to the prompts of Dark, Void, Blurry around themes of mental health disorders of distress, anxiety and depression.
For this magazine, I have done some early experimentation with self-portraits, using various techniques to visualise how living with depression can feel.
I know social media is a mostly staged exhibition of everyone's bests parts of life mixed with a constant reminder that society is sliding into chaos and hatred with misinformation and everyone pitted against each other, blended with the subconscious notion that I/ we will get to the end of the infinity scroll, that just absorbing one more precisely length video will satisfy my reward centre.
As someone who lives with a mental health disorder I often find that my work explores this subject quite often, even if it is inadvertently. I have found myself torn with social media and go through stages of getting rid of the apps and suspending my accounts and doom scrolling my life away. Trying to find that middle ground seems impossible for me and I keep yo-yoing between the extremes. Annoyingly it's become an asset for work and keeping connected with friends and exhibitions!
I set out with these images to try and go against all the techniques I’ve learnt as a retoucher to preserve image detail. I wanted to create a glitch effect, making the images have a digital-distortion look to them, to represent how social media seemingly tears away strips of myself and distorts my view on myself and the wider outside world.
It’s often harder to put into words how living with a mental health disorder can feel than to try and express it visually. For me, I feel a duality between when I have it under control and when it has control over me. When I think back to previous bouts of depression, I often feel that I am looking back at someone who isn’t me, that the person going through it is the Hyde to my Jekyll (or vise versa). I do believe that depression is something that is a part of me and not something that can be cured or cut out of me like cancer. When we (my depression and I) are aligned I find I can draw on a unique outlook on life to help me create art, enjoy life and many other things - however sometimes I don’t see that it is growing and sneaking up on me and many things can lead me to letting my guard down and it getting out of control.
Through layering the various versions of the images I created onto each other and blending them together, I hope to show how these sometimes small changes combined with each other can drastically distort the reality of what I am seeing. Showing a more and more unrecognisable self.
