Antonia Attwood
The subject of mental health remains within hazardous terrain. From private to public vocalisations, the conversation demands prudence and care, for both ourselves and those involved. Yet the purported breakthrough in public expressions of mental health is not without its caveats. Many voices remain unheard and neglected due to perceived stigma and cultural confines.
Informed by personal health conditions and her mother’s Bipolar Disorder diagnosis, artist Antonia Attwood positions herself as an investigator, medium, and participant within the realm of psychological well-being.
Bringing the focal lens closer, Antonia uses visual storytelling in the pursuit of highlighting the ‘individuality of the human condition’. In this process, Antonia extends her practice to discuss her management of Psoriasis - an immune-mediated chronic skin condition characterized by the excessive growth of skin cells, leading to furfuraceous rashes - and the causally linked inflammatory condition Psoriatic Arthritis, distinguished by pain and swelling in the joints.
Beyond her practice, Antonia leads Creative Health Camden, a dynamic charity dedicated to the creative well-being of patients attending the James Wigg and Queens Crescent practices in Kentish Town.
The Poorly Project sat down with Antonia to discuss her life-long experiences with mental health and chronic health conditions and how they have materialised into a creative practice.
For artist Antonia Attwood, art-making provokes answers and the camera serves as the apparatus that offers a high-powered examination over her primary area of investigation: health. Orderly, systematized mechanisms are used to explore individual mind spaces, with each sequence furthering our understanding. This creative impetus is Antonia’s ardent endeavour to understand diverse health narratives.
A considered visual interpretation of what it means to live with a mental health condition, Antonia’s practice beckons a collaborative process with anonymous participants. Figures hidden behind Gaussian blurs and textured glass, their hands and feet are the only corporeal elements left to detect. Yet their words and the filmic sensations Antonia incorporates are cornerstones to a person’s internal state. The scales of self-disclosure are poised, and participants are able to share their experiences whilst protecting their privacy.
“Co-creating becomes something where they hopefully find comfort. You always have to think about the ethics of people's experiences, especially when they're under the umbrella of mental health or distress. One of the ways I've gotten around it is by always making sure that any participant who shares their stories with me is anonymous. I don't reveal names. I won't reveal who they are”
“But it is an interpretation. That's what filmmaking is about. You're not saying you know everything and that's the point of why I've always wanted to work with lots of different people. It's because every human experience is different”
One such anonymous figure within Antonia’s work is her mother. Diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder when Antonia was young, her mother’s mental health condition would serve as one of the foundational influences to her creative practice. Each moment of recollection and reflection between the artist and her mother seeks to deepen their relationship; illuminating the vital support needed to sustain it, emboldened by their respective mental health experiences.
Antonia calls upon emotional snapshots from her childhood. The use of the antiquated term ‘manic depression’ by medical practitioners upon her mother’s initial diagnosis or witnessing her periods of mania - unbeknownst to Antonia’s younger self who had become accustomed to these episodes and registered them as ordinary partying. When these emotional snapshots are held side-by-side with My Mother Tongue (2014), Antonia begins the process of intricately and sensitively detailing her mother’s experience.
Through My Mother Tongue, Antonia offers a split-screen view. Fixed shots of her mother lying in bed, consuming medication, and frantically rubbing her hands are accompanied by static, steam, sparks, effervescence, and fog. Feverish, overbearing sounds impose nauseating dread. The screens gradually interchange and we begin to understand that the subject is under the effects of their condition and its medication.
These audiovisual elements swing the viewer between sensorial overdrive and a disheartening silence. A misleading minimalism - or more aptly put - a dualism that speaks to our inner worlds, the outside irrepresentable of the psyche. This dualism would become a compositional motif within Antonia’s filmic works.
The language shared between mother and daughter offers Antonia fluency on how health is interpersonally, medically, and creatively delineated. Black Box (2016) demonstrates the incongruence between diagnostic, neuroscientific terminology and the more personal, widely-comprehended vernacular attached to mental health.
“I always come back to this idea that the way the health care system works wants to understand us as an exact science. It wants to be able to put us into ticked boxes that feel comfortable because it's easier to understand. That is now the reality of health language. I do understand why it exists, but there is limited language and discourse around health”
“I think art can really do more” continues Antonia.
“Art is about understanding that there are differences, nuances, and changes - that things aren't static, that everything is moving. And that's why I think the only way I can process human experiences is through art”
In Black Box, Antonia continues her dualistic approach through quick cuts of nature. Thin branches emerge from the void that presented viewers with plasma and a restless, gelatinous brain. Nature’s alliance with peace and mental decompression is abruptly disturbed. Sonorous, irregular pulses together with a flatlined trill; nature now appears unsafe, brandishing itself with anxiety. Antonia’s depiction of nature is a speculum of the human mind when confronting mental health conditions, embodying how our mental health exists within a wavelength that is susceptible to indiscriminate change.
Taking her practice from the inside out, Antonia has spent the last two years developing a body of work focused on her ten-year journey with psoriasis and more recently, psoriatic arthritis. Maybe it was the chickenpox? (2024) explores Antonia’s two-year tribulation of becoming a living specimen through ceaseless testing and medication trials.
Due to the immunosuppressant side effects of medication for psoriatic arthritis inducing immunocompromisation - a patient is tested for every possible virus that they may have been exposed to throughout their lifetime. Even with a fierce, memorable case of chickenpox during her childhood, Antonia underwent testing. Results indicated that she had no signs of antibodies to protect her against the virus, urging routine vaccinations, further medication trials and bimonthly tests to assess her inflammation levels.
For Antonia, the title Maybe it was the chickenpox? questions the causal factors for her psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, and whether or not chickenpox could be considered the prime suspect. In response to the arduous process, Antonia turned to her creative practice to regain control. In response to this arduous process, Antonia turned to her creative practice to regain control.
Antonia’s initial creative investigations into her condition would invite photomicrography - an up close and almost confrontational observation of her collected clusters of skin. Appearing almost crystalline, the photographs resemble the way we scrutinize our bodies in moments of health paranoia and fearful flare-ups. This act of closely examining the skin - almost to the point of discomfort - conveys a desperate need to identify and understand what is happening to our bodies. As photographs, the skin samples have been spherically cropped to mimic a petri dish or physically hosted in a small rectangular box made to store insects.
Holding one of the boxes, Antonia shares how she subverted her challenging medical relationship with psoriasis into creative empowerment:
“I can look at myself as a specimen. I can be the one that's investigating it from a different point of view. It is about writing my own narrative”
“The illness can take this time from me, but I am taking it back in the way that I want to take it back. That is going to be by sitting in my studio for four hours, making a painting about how that felt. It is a radical act of control”
“I need to do this to fulfil myself because this illness is taking from me, rather than giving something to me. So I am filling that time back up with creativity. This is a requirement. And I am deeply unhappy when I do not fulfil it”
The pain caused by psoriatic arthritis would force Antonia to revise her creative processing of psoriasis through alternative sensory methods. Unable to hold her camera, she would begin to experiment with latex and acrylic.
Latex requires lubrication, whilst acrylic paint dries down quickly - when incorporated into one another, the two are faced with irreconcilable differences. Only by persistently reapplying the paint is Antonia able to ensure they adhere to one another. This process of layering paint on latex speaks to Antonia’s mediation between her skin and any products she applies to ease or conceal flare-ups.
Experimentation with latex and paint in 'Maybe it was the chickenpox?' (2024)
An intimate study of the canvas shows how the paint responds to the latex, forming dissonant textures. Patches of powder foundation and pink blush recreate Antonia’s attempts to conceal stubborn patches of skin. Her psoriasis demands care, gradually exhausting her patience. Each painting emanates frustration and resolve.
Discussing the significance of the term ‘poorly’, Antonia’s response is forthright, distinguished from the sense of clarity and disciplined address of health embedded into her work. It enlivens the truth of what it can mean to live with health conditions that are at times difficult to manage:
½ of Places of restoration (2024)
“I absolutely fucking hate being poorly. I hate it more than anything. It's frustrating. It pisses me off. I'm angry about it”
“I think about how I wouldn't have had this experience if I wasn't poorly. I am proud of everything I have done despite the difficulties. I feel that it builds resilience in you. It's changed me as a person, giving empathy to other people who have experienced being poorly as well. It's a different understanding when you get poorly yourself”
“I'm brave. I'm resilient. I'm strong. I'm creative - I'm all of these things. Because of and despite my illness…ask me tomorrow when I'm feeling really tired and I'll tell you I hate it”
You can learn more about Antonia on Instagram and her official website.
All Images Courtesy of The Poorly Project, with the exception of Skin samples in ‘Maybe it was the chickenpox?’ (2024) by Antonia Attwood.
Films Courtesy of Antonia Attwood
