Physical limitation leads to new direction

When I started this process I was focused on the positive feelings of freedom; uplifting feel-good stuff.  I wanted my work to reflect that feeling; I wanted it to feel like taking a breath by the sea on a beautiful windswept day, like bursting out of the water, like all constraints have lifted.  This was my direction, where my head was at. 

As the months have gone on my feelings have become much darker, much more focused on the restrained, the confined, the tortured and the pained.  This is in direct relation to my physical health, I’ve being going through a real change in how my Sarcoidosis affects me; it used to be I’d have one flare up a year, it would be hell for a couple of months but then I’d be just fine for months before another flare up. Living with the flare ups was made so much easier by the knowledge that there would be an end, that I would feel better.  Since December 2011 my illness has taken a turn for the worse in that I was getting constant low level symptoms with no let up.  Steroids helped but left me open to constant infections and massive weight gain, so in March I started to reduce the steroids to the most minimum level and started taking a new drug - Hydroxychloroquine.

Since March I have been feeling progressively worse and worse, the physical pain and bone crunching fatigue were never ending, I couldn’t see an end point and started to become severely depressed.  Trying to make my wooden screens led to floods of tears as my joints could not stand up to repetitive sawing; the fatigue was so bad that considering the mountain of work I had ahead of me was daunting; I had to scrap lots of my filming ideas because they involved too much travelling and movement, something that would knock me out for days afterwards - alongside all of this I am trying to maintain my job.

My depression got so bad that every time someone would make the innocent inquiry ‘how are you? I would burst in to tears.  I couldn’t conceive how on earth I would be able to do a Fine Art sculpture course while feeling so awful and so physically incapable.

At a certain point I thought to myself it’s crazy to try and continue on this project as if nothing was happening, sticking to my plan.  I decided that I wanted the viewer to experience some of the physical restriction I faced; I wanted them not to feel uplifted but uncomfortable and uneasy. I was going to use my misery and depression rather than fight against it!  That’s how I came up with the idea of using the space under the stairs; it is accessible for some though most will have to physically contort slightly to go inside.  Others may not be able to access it at all, for them there will be a monitor on a plinth showing the projection.

I know it’s a big change in direction but I think it’s still relevant to the theme.  For me, freedom right now would be being healthy, being physically capable of doing everything I wanted to do - in reality I am constrained and limited by my physical health yet I still yearn to breathe free.

These are some of my darker sketchbook doodles...