Collages 10

“There’s a lot of meaning here, relating to what’s gone on in the last year of my life. My daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy, and I have epilepsy as well so we can no longer live together. In this corner here I have an image of some stars on a black background. I believe my brother who committed suicide is somewhere in the stars. And I made an RIP over the top of that. Under here I have images of an arrow and the police. My brother in law was shot and killed by the police on New Year’s Day this year, for a crime he didn’t commit. I see faces in everything, and I hear things as well, that’s about my psychosis. Here I have a chess board in black and white and on top of it I have put a name, which represents my brother who committed suicide a year ago. Marilyn Monroe here looks almost like she could be in a coffin because I suffer from suicidal ideation. And behind her I have a brick wall. I am always feeling like I am hitting a brick wall in my life. Everywhere I turn. Underneath the image of what would be my daughter and myself I put the words “you are woman”, question mark, meaning I lost my daughter, am I still a woman? Am I still a mother? Underneath here I have got “the false promise”. I have been let down a lot in my life. My birth-father worked for the SAS and he has worked a lot for the British government and yes, maybe this is my paranoia, but I do believe he is still alive. I don’t really know him very well, but he’s a spy. Here I have an upside down spiral staircase because that feels like how my life is going – upside down, spiraling, and above that I have the word flashback because I often suffer from flashbacks into things that happened to me in childhood.”

“This one is more visual. It has quite a lot of things in it that I like on top of other things that I am not so keen on. So in the top left corner there is an image of purple sky with razor sharp cliff edges, on the top there is a word saying ‘balancing act’ because that is how my life is: on edge, balancing. There is an image of a part of a brain that has had an aneurism. In my family we have a lot of brain problems. My parents are first cousins, and now my daughter has epilepsy, so brain images always come to me. And then I have the words here growing up saying ‘unreal/real’ next to a much larger image of an old camera with a new lens. And we have lots of cellos in the background. I used to play quite well until I had a seizure and knocked out my eardrums.”