My journey towards “finding healing” began even before I started making art. There was always this drive inside me to investigate and to understand things about the world, about myself. I tried to have my family and other people understand where I'm coming from and why my symptoms manifest the way they do. I began to explore and visually demonstrate what madness looks like. I realize representation was key for me, not only for my own healing though. Through my ability to represent madness in art, I feel like a lot of the healing comes from the ability to communicate and be understood by others.

I was focusing on just painting for a long time. I rarely used any paintbrushes though. I've always just used my hands and my body to make paintings. Someone once commented, “Wow, this is very performative, I think people would want to watch you paint.” Later, I discovered that I could use the voice, body and sound to represent something that feels so stuck inside through performance in the last 2 years of college. I was dumping paint on my body, bathing with art materials and drawing with my body in front of a live audience to represent my mad experiences.

Madness, a balancing act

When I was reading about borderline personality, I realized that my brain does black and white or binary thinking. It's almost like a stress response. I started making a ton of art using just black and white paint.

Black and white tarps flanking me on either side, covered with black and white paint, as they're being pushed by fans from behind them. They're both hitting me as I'm walking on this already unstable wooden plank, and I fail at this pretty often. If I fall off the beam or the beam falls beneath me, then I have to set it back up and return to the front end of the beam and try again. This somewhat simple activity is just a day in the life like mine: walking on the beam with these things happening, and then if I eventually make it to the other side, I survived the day.