Corban Estate Art Center Auckland
Project Discription:
To create a piece of work speaking to the Kaupapa of Mental Health Awareness. Proceeds going to benefit Changing Minds NZ.
Objectives
- To create a piece for Corban Estate Art Gallery’s “Pieces of Me” Exhibition for donation and sale - to be completed before April 15th 2019
- Use this oportunity to process and unpack own inner dialouge - Further push my work, expand into fine art practice - Network on a national level
I have struggled through sever clinical depression as a result of trauma for most of my life. After years of bad decisions, isolation, drug ad- diction, suicide attempts and a very close call, I fought my way back to recovery. I use the word recovery because mental health is a disease but it doesn’t have to be a death sentence. There are tools that one can learn to help with the symptoms and gain freedom from. I still battle with panic attacks and the black dog is ever looming but I live a life now that I could only have dreamt about in the depths of that hole.
I am thankful to depression, thankful for the trauma, without each I wouldn’t be the per- son I am today. I wanted this piece to speak to that. I spent the last year creating these two paintings. Using them as literal visual representation of my anxiety. It is 12 months of building layers, adding only when I had a moment with depression. The depth of blackness, the richness of it, holding intrinsic meaning and streaking her way down canvas.
I see these episodes now as my bodies warn- ing system, telling me that I’m not using all the tools I have acquired over the years to man- age my disease. Things like therapy, reaching out, connecting with another person, eating right, exercising. So, to me this painting is the beauty of that. Me honouring its presence and thanking it for keeping me alive. Depression is dark but there is beauty to be found there
ARTISTS STATEMENT
She wraps me in delicious blackness Her fingers gouging sunken nails through my detachment She is comforting, she is home, she’ll end me if I let her roam, through the sunken elegance of the socials roam
Broken children scattered, she finds all the little pieces Upon the once beautiful landscapes, of our hopes and dreams
She transfigured me into tone of resolute, bul- lets in my hand, turned into peace. I gurgle her love and spit it at her feet.
I found your forced beauty and wrap it upon me like a cloak, You are the battle field upon which I once woke. I stand and watch her, tending to the ghosts left meek,
I tend over those that step onto her grounds muddy and weak and cast you aside like my old man’s eye.
Her echo’s scream of my betrayal, she’ll let me win if I fail. But I found your heel at the bottom of a drain. I got your number, an arsenal of self-love de- spite suckling at your tumour
Corban Road Art Estate Henderson