Collages 9

“Typically when I have hallucinations I’d see a lions head in the background somewhere. Just coming out of the back. I would see quite a few, and I would see the background as spiky, very jagged, very sharp. I would be drawn to trees with their branches and I would see spikes and spiked up objects and that’s why I chose this particular type of background. And so I transposed lots of heads of lions on this background. I photocopied it again so the lions blend in a bit more. The heads would be there, not doing anything, but that would be enough to frighten me. I mean, it would be enough to frighten me previously. These heads are now changing into eyes, which is a bit better. It means that they are not as foreboding as they were before, but at the end of the day l don’t want to see anything.”

“The eyes are just windows. Everything that’s a window seems to be looking at me. So, anything that is round, or has a shape of a window feels like its looking at me. For whatever reason my brain is saying that window is looking at me. It feels like an eye. I don’t look at it directly, I just look away from it. When it was the lions I could literally see lions. Now I see eyes, the windows are transposed into eyes. It feels like they are looking at me. It’s the same sort of thing. When I am in a heightened anxious state and somehow my anxiety is projected onto a building it comes back to me as eyes and mouths. That can also apply indoors if there is an unusual combination of shapes.”

“There is no way I can create what I actually see. The collages are more creative. They are not exactly what I see so I can work on them without feeling that I will flip over. Looking at photos of the actual places is difficult – in the collages I am not actually there – I am creating what I think it would be like if I was there.”