To begin with, I did some research in to artists who expressed mental illnesses within their works in different ways, two interesting artists that I found were Adriana Varejao and Natalia Pereira, They both had different background but explored the ways in which the human mind can be mentally distorted.
To explore the work of Varejao I began to look at experimenting with tiles, breaking them up and gluing them onto a large piece of cardboard to create an interesting composition an juxtaposing this with lining them up equally, to show that the same product can create a different feeling based on its composition. I then moved on to working with a larger piece of cardboard,k Approximately A1 sized, I stuck two of these together and opened the centre so it mimicked an explosion, I fill this space with cotton wool balls, fake blood and other materials to gain this flesh like look that Varejao achieves in her work. To further the meaning of this piece I did some research and read some books that contained the theme of mental illness, one of these books was the "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (By the end, the narrator is hopelessly insane, convinced that there are many creeping women around and that she herself has come out of the wallpaper—that she herself is the trapped woman in the wallpaper) and so I photocopied pages of this book among others (The Birds, A Clockwork Orange, 4.48 Psychosis) and created a wallpaper, then painted it with a tinged yellow, this colours would signify the decomposition of the wallpaper, it is also a colour that you could not miss, as a metaphor for how mental illnesses can be so significant to people yet still avoided in society.
To further my work on Pereira I did some photography of another student with string and elastic bands around his face (as seen on the left page) This work shows the struggle that people go through in order to reach perfection in their bodies, but by doing this they are distorting themselves. It also represents how the idea of perfection itself is distorted as it cannot be simply defined. I played around with lighting and position with these photos as first and found that the composition could either make the subject appear as a dominant figure or fairly submissive, which in a way reflects the image of society as you can be a strong or a weak figure when mediated in the public eye. To further this again I experimented with different effects on Photoshop such as the liquefy tool which distorted the image even more. I used the burn tool to darken an image (which is what created the more dominating appearance along with the higher position) I also used a posterise filter, just to see what other impressions I could create, I felt that this didn't work as well as the image seemed to lose its meaning.
From this I gained a large interest in photography and the use of layering photos and so I took some more photos focusing more on the emotions that could be expressed with mental illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia and layered them over the top of each other (Images on the right page in the image above) changing the opacity so that each emotion was still visible, these showed the different emotions that people go through are faint (but always still there) and the neutral image is more visible because people don't like to show their true emotions. I photographed the photos again using effects built in in the camera to achieve different effects such as soft light, film grain and a black and white filter, these made the images have a duller tone and feel to them, however it was not my aim to make the images artificial as I was aiming to show the reality of emotions that people go through during issues with mental health. I then printed these images on acetate sheets and began to suspend them over the top of them to begin to create more of an installation piece. I experimented with stitching some of the images together, suspending them inside a perspex box and projecting the images over them again. From this I found I really like the idea of using the perspex box, but I felt I still had to further my ideas.
