Follow Me Out
Follow Me Out 2011
I chose the disciplines of painting and drawing with the intention of documenting an active engagement with my bouts of acute depression. For me depression brings apathy, lethargy and pain, and I have sought, through scrupulous self observation, to understand whether the meditative but often energizing processes of painting and drawing could make me happy, could help me transcend these disabling states of mind.
Many artists whose work portrays pathos and other emotions usually do so by using expressionistic techniques’, but I still want and need to paint paintings and or draw beautifully crafted artefacts, I think this is the paradox and ambiguous nature of my work.
This body of work is a quite a departure from my previous work, where I exclusively made paintings of myself. I have found a greater freedom in using the female nude as an armature for the colours and compositions of my states of mind as I go down and as I come up.
“Melancholy is not just a category of subjective experience, but also a cultural trope that involves the disjunction and the interrelation between the self and world, between the contingent and the transcendent.”
I thought this quote by Lewis Carroll from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass describes the feeling of depression well.
The diptych Dichotomy (thought versus action) is the crux of this exhibition; it is the heaven and the hell of depression.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit hole went straight on like a tunnel in some way, and then suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well. Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, but she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything… Lewis Carroll
Follow Me Out – Paintings
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Drawings
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