“You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.”
-Sylvia Plath
Medicine" is an 18x24 canvas shaped by the full-spectrum extremity of bipolar disorder and the chemical intervention used to blunt its volatile cycles, mirroring the profound alienation and psychic fractures. The piece visualizes the exact, bitter friction of a mind being medically subdued, where a heavy, opaque shroud of white aggressively cascades from the top of the frame like a clinical curtain or a numbing, chemical shell. This stark barrier deliberately shears through the vibrant internal landscape below, dividing and muting the central figure whose soft, gaze is trapped behind a succession of rigid, vertical blind alleys. Her face, flushed with the warm, vulnerable reds of the anemones beside her, exists mid-erasure, caught in the painful process of becoming a numb as the white cascade half-deliberately cuts off her grip on the living world, capturing the heavy, immobilized weight of a depressive drop chemically induced to flatten the peaks. Near the bottom, a fractured horizon of gold leaf tears across the canvas, a glittering yet jagged scar that marks the chaotic threshold of the manic pole, where the memory of joy and creative impulse burns with a sharp, erratic intensity before being bound by stabilization. Piercing through the white oblivion, delicate embroidered thread radiates outward from the heart of the white anemone, a meticulous, quiet insistence on an inherent vitality, tracing a fragile frequency of hope that resists total erasure even as the cold, pharmaceutical numbness swallows the subject whole.
“You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.”
-Sylvia Plath
Medicine" is an 18x24 canvas shaped by the full-spectrum extremity of bipolar disorder and the chemical intervention used to blunt its volatile cycles, mirroring the profound alienation and psychic fractures. The piece visualizes the exact, bitter friction of a mind being medically subdued, where a heavy, opaque shroud of white aggressively cascades from the top of the frame like a clinical curtain or a numbing, chemical shell. This stark barrier deliberately shears through the vibrant internal landscape below, dividing and muting the central figure whose soft, gaze is trapped behind a succession of rigid, vertical blind alleys. Her face, flushed with the warm, vulnerable reds of the anemones beside her, exists mid-erasure, caught in the painful process of becoming a numb as the white cascade half-deliberately cuts off her grip on the living world, capturing the heavy, immobilized weight of a depressive drop chemically induced to flatten the peaks. Near the bottom, a fractured horizon of gold leaf tears across the canvas, a glittering yet jagged scar that marks the chaotic threshold of the manic pole, where the memory of joy and creative impulse burns with a sharp, erratic intensity before being bound by stabilization. Piercing through the white oblivion, delicate embroidered thread radiates outward from the heart of the white anemone, a meticulous, quiet insistence on an inherent vitality, tracing a fragile frequency of hope that resists total erasure even as the cold, pharmaceutical numbness swallows the subject whole.
