Viva

‘Hi. I thought I’d start by showing you my latest completed piece ‘A Black and White view of the World’.

‘These are shadow boxes. Different layers of illustration are spaced from front to back of the box-frames, creating depth and adding another dimension. I have used pen and ink in a surrealist style’.

‘These were my first ever attempts at shadow-boxing. its a bit difficult to see in an image, but I painted each layer individually and raised each one higher with foam pads. Although I enjoyed the effect of the box, the content wasn’t resonating enough with me.

All of my previous work has been about mental illness and the personification of it. I wanted to incorporate this into a shadow-box format. I decided to focus on one particular illness’.

‘Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), also known as unstable personality disorder, is a chronic mental illness defined by long-term patterns of abnormal behaviour characterised by unstable relationships, unstable sense of self and unstable emotions (On the board is the 9 criteria that need to be met for a diagnosis).

My interest in this comes from personal experience as well as psychological curiosity. it has always fascinated me how different each persons perception of reality is. As well as how much mental illness can warp reality’.

‘This is my first BPD sketch. I’ve always found images better explain something- as well as helping mw make sense of them.

This is a drawing of the words you just saw on the last slide, and although they’re both saying the same thing – I think the drawing is much more scary.

What you’re seeing is three personalities struggling to co-exist amongst a plethora of emotions and hurt.

At this point I already knew I wanted to explore shadow-box art- but I needed to get this on paper before I exploded.

I Spoke to Angus about shadow-box art, he suggested looking at toy theatres’.

‘Toy theatres were primarily around in Victorian times, and gave me the idea to take shadow-boxing a step further’.

‘And so I transformed my original sketch into a deep shadow-box piece. Although overall I consider this to be a successful piece, it wasn’t what I had envisioned.

I think making my first box 60cm deep was slightly too ambitious- so I started to look at artists who have done shadow-boxing in the past’.‘I saw this artist on Instagram and is one of the reasons I wanted to try shadow-boxing myself. He has a very illustrative style as well as his beautiful, surrealish compositions’.

‘Katy Campbell can be seen in the first piece I showed you ‘A Black and White view of the World’. I enjoy the way she cuts out the illustrations of a book to tell the story in a different way. Story telling has always been apart of my own practise’.

‘This was the next piece I did. I tried watercolour in this one and a much shallower shadow box.

Dissociation is a common phenomenon experienced by people with BPD. It happens when emotions get too overwhelming, the body goes into protection mode and can feel like an out-of-body experience.

I also had to get creative with materials in this one. I settled for transparent plastic for the consciousness, so that it is both there and isn’t.’

‘Which brings me back to this piece’

‘In this one I wanted to portray what the world looks like through the eyes of a BPD sufferer. Often, they see the world in black and white- good or evil.

I had so many more ideas for this piece that I decided to turn it into a tryptic’.

‘The left frame is entirely bad thing, and the right is just good. At first glance they may look quite similar, but I wanted the content to be contrasting as possible.

When I showed Angus, he said they reminded him of Victorian picture books’.

‘So that’s where I’m going next. I am currently working on a piece in which the viewer will be able to interact with the drawing. this will be displayed in a shadow-box frame, with a mechanism on the outside which the viewer will be able to turn the ferris wheel themselves. Making them apart of the art. The people in the cars represent different personalities, and the spinning wheel represents the constant highs and lows of BPD’.