Distressed

In this series, Distressed, I explore the relationships between individuals and how their mental illnesses manifest. My goal is to manipulate black and white film negatives using different techniques to represent how each person experiences their mental illnesses at the same time showing the progression of how mental illness can overcome someone's life. The first technique used is scratching the negative using a scalpel. Brad is the subject related to this manipulation. Brad suffers from insomnia and anxiety, and often feels scattered and frazzled. These scratchings demonstrate how his anxiety can slowly creep up until it is overcoming him. In the past brad has also had suicidal ideations that can be referenced in the sharp scratches of the negatives.

Burning the negatives with a lighter was the secondary manipulation. Katherine relates her mental illnesses to this technique. Katherine suffers from depression, anxiety, and OCD which are all heightened by her chronic illness; fibromyalgia. She has likened her pain and depression to feeling like her body is ‘on fire’. The burning technique represents her struggles well, with the pain slowly worsening and taking over her whole person. The manipulation used for Taby is stitching. With this I cut up the individual negatives into smaller pieces, then stitching them back together with a needle and thread. Taby suffers from anxiety and ptsd that often manifest itself in the form of flashbacks. Taby’s flashbacks are described as a fractured reality, with her having no control over when or where a flashback could be triggered. The idea of a split life is emphasised by the stitched negatives, having been shattered and woven back together again. In my research I discovered the differing severity of mental illness and decided to represent this in triptychs. Each image has a differing severity in relation to the subjects mental health. In the first images they portray a time when the illness is bearable and the subject is able to more forward without it being a constant distraction. Then with the second images, the illness can be portrayed as more prominent and harder to push away or deal with. Then finally when the person has become overcome by their illness, it becomes unbearable and it is now their constant mental state.