Projects

Outside of my writing and more stereotypical ‘work’, sometimes I work on other mad projects. This includes making mad art and, I hope, a growing body of mad community projects. This is my heart work. I hope these projects matter to other mad folks and psych survivors.

Mad art

Mad art has a long history, though it’s often been stolen from us by institutions, ‘interpreted’ by psych workers, or used in ways that stereotype and demean us. Despite this, mad art persists.

I’ve long thought that the creative arts are a natural partner to madness. I can try to tell you what it’s like to ‘turtle’ (my word for what others call ‘dissociation’), or to cut my skin as a way to survive, or to see visions, or hear voices. But frankly, words are inadequate. So much of mad experience resists language—but art is endlessly expansive.

Sometimes I think madness itself is a form of creative arts.

When life becomes so intolerable, overwhelming and agonising, madness creates another way to exist, a new reality, a new self or selves… it is expression and being. And when I think about madness in this way, I feel a new kind of horror about the ways contemporary psychiatry seeks to drug and shock and lock away our madness, instead of taking the time to see and hear the important stories it holds.

Art can be a tool with which we dig our way to freedom

During incarceration in psych hospitals, I learned that art can be a path to a kind of freedom. It didn’t get me out of the locked ward, but art allowed me to exist in a different kind of relationship with the institution. A way to resist oppressive power, to protest and to remind myself, in some of the very worst times, that I am still here. Sometimes, in very mad moments, art even offers a way to make peace with myself.

If you want to explore some more mad art, two of my favourite mad artists are Dolly Sen and The Vacuum Cleaner.

Mad art & community

The Slice/Silence project brings together mad art and mad community—no wonder I decided to base my PhD around it.

Mad community

Read more about my work alongside other mad folks to found and co-faciliate the only anti-carceral, peer-run, suicide support group in Naarm for 14 months.