In My Head

IN MY HEAD

In My Head explores grief, dissociation and the experience of living in a body that has been repeatedly interpreted by others.

The work developed intuitively through my process of allowing forms and surfaces to suggest their own direction. The oversized doll’s head and smaller doll faces draw on childhood and the loss of innocence. From the age of eight, my weight became a recurring explanation for health concerns, creating a sense of shame around my body long before I was old enough to understand or challenge it. As an adult, serious neurological symptoms were again dismissed or misinterpreted, before I was eventually diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.

Ruler markings encircle the head as a reference to this history of measurement, judgement and the assumption that my weight was the problem. The number 44 marks my age at the time of making. Having once struggled to imagine myself living beyond 35, it acts as both a timestamp and a small celebration of survival, with a nod to 44's association as an ‘angel number’.

The phrases “IN MY HEAD” and “OUT OF MY MIND” play with the language of disbelief. I was made to feel that my symptoms were ‘in my head’ in the sense that they were imagined or psychological, when the disease was, quite literally, in my head. The experience of illness, dismissal and uncertainty has itself affected my mental health, at times leaving me feeling ‘out of my mind’. The two phrases collapse the distinction between physical and psychological experience.

A centipede-like creature crawls across the back of the head, referring to an MS sensory symptom that creates the convincing sensation of insects crawling across my skin. Despite knowing the sensation can be neurological, I still check. Once, it really was a spider.

Small figures cascade down the body of the work like a flood. They represent waves of grief: my own, but also the recognition of grief as an experience shared with others. Female faces significantly outnumber male faces, reflecting my sense of kinship with women and my awareness of gendered violence. They also hold a question that has followed my own medical experiences: might my story have been different if more of the people treating me had been women?

Among the male faces is a single lion. Initially the result of the moulds available to me, it has become a wry response to “not all men” and a parallel to the ‘man or bear’ debate, where the non-human figure interrupts the division between male and female faces.

The predominantly blue surface draws deliberately on the visual language of traditional blue-and-white ceramics. Layers of printed and painted decoration accumulate alongside figures, text, drips and imperfections, allowing difficult experiences to inhabit an object that remains colourful, excessive and visually seductive.

Rather than resolving these experiences into a single narrative, Out of My Mind allows them to accumulate: childhood shame, medical dismissal, neurological sensation, gender, survival and shared grief held together within one unstable body.